Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies And Their Alternatives [1st Edition] 9081857525, 9789081857529

The Unlike Us Reader offers a critical examination of social media, bringing together theoretical essays, personal discu

876 67 4MB

English Pages 386 Year 2013

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD FILE

Polecaj historie

Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies And Their Alternatives [1st Edition]
 9081857525, 9789081857529

  • Commentary
  • TruePDF
Citation preview

SO AN CI D AL TH M EI ED R IA AL M TE O RN NO AT PO IV LI ES ES

Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives

2

Unlike Us Reader Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives Editors: Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch Copy editing: Rachel Somers Miles Design: Katja van Stiphout Cover design: Giulia Ciliberto and Silvio Lorusso Printer: Joh. Enschedé, Amsterdam Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013 ISBN: 978-90-818575-2-9 Contact Institute of Network Cultures phone: +31205951866 fax: +31205951840 email: [email protected] web: www.networkcultures.org Order a copy of this book by email: [email protected] A PDF of this publication can also be downloaded freely at: www.networkcultures.org/publications/inc-readers Join the Unlike Us mailinglist at: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/unlike-us_listcultures.org Supported by: CREATE-IT applied research, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) and Stichting Democratie en Media Thanks to Margreet Riphagen at INC, to all of the authors for their contributions, Patrice Riemens for his translation, Rachel Somers Miles for her copy editing, and to Stichting Democratie en Media for their financial support. This publication is licensed under Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). Attribution To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

social media monopolies and their alternatives

Edited by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch INC Reader #8

3

4

Previously published INC Readers: The INC Reader series is derived from conference contributions and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures. The readers are available in print and PDF form. INC Reader #7: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, 2011. INC Reader #6: Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube, 2011. INC Reader #5: Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (eds), Urban Screens Reader, 2009. INC Reader #4: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, 2008. INC Reader #3: Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds), MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, 2007. INC Reader #2: Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli (eds), C’LICK ME: A Netporn Studies Reader, 2007. INC Reader #1: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds), Incommunicado Reader, 2005. All INC Readers, and other publications like the Network Notebooks Series and Theory on Demand, can be downloaded as a PDF for free from www.networkcultures.org/publications. Or check www.scribd.com/collections/3073695/INC-Readers for print on demand, and www.issuu.com/instituteofnetworkcultures for online reading.

social media monopolies and their alternatives

5

CONTENTS Geert Lovink A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader

9

THEORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA Bernard Stiegler The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies

16

David M. Berry Against Remediation

31

Ganaele Langlois Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life

50

Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity

61

Martin Warnke Databases as Citadels in the Web 2.0

76

Andrea Miconi Under the Skin of the Networks: How Concentration Affects Social Practices in Web 2.0 Environments

89

Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web

103

CRITICAL PLATFORM ANALYSIS Korinna Patelis Political Economy and Monopoly Abstractions: What Social Media Demand

117

Jenny Kennedy Rhetorics of Sharing: Data, Imagination, and Desire

127

Mercedes Bunz As You Like It: Critique in the Era of an Affirmative Discourse

137

Caroline Bassett Silence, Delirium, Lies?

146

Ippolita and Tiziana Mancinelli The Facebook Aquarium: Freedom in a Profile

159

PLATFORM CASE STUDIES Mariann Hardey and David Beer Talking About Escape

166

D.E. Wittkower Boredom on Facebook

188

Leighton Evans How to Build a Map for Nothing: Immaterial Labor and Location-Based Social Networking

189

Andrew McNicol None of Your Business? Analyzing the Legitimacy and Effects of Gendering Social Spaces Through System Design

200

6

Robert W. Gehl ‘Why I Left Facebook’: Stubbornly Refusing to not Exist even After Opting out of Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Graph

220

ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS Simona Lodi Illegal Art and Other Stories About Social Media

239

Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio Face-to-Facebook, Smiling in the Eternal Party

254

Louis Doulas and Wyatt Niehaus On Pleaselike.com and Facebook Bliss

259

Brad Troemel Art After Social Media as a Rejection of Free Market Conventions

264

Tatiana Bazzichelli Disruptive Business as Artistic Intervention

269

ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA USES Marc Stumpel Facebook Resistance: Augmented Freedom

274

Pavlos Hatzopoulos and Nelli Kambouri The Tactics of Occupation: Becoming Cockroach

289

Tiziana Terranova and Joan Donovan Occupy Social Networks: The Paradoxes of Using Corporate Social Media in Networked Movements

296

ALTERNATIVES Lonneke van der Velden Meeting the Alternatives: Notes About Making Profiles and Joining Hackers

312

Sebastian Sevignani Facebook vs. Diaspora: A Critical Study

323

Florencio Cabello, Marta G. Franco and Alexandra Haché Towards a Free Federated Social Web: Lorea Takes the Networks!

338

Solon Barocas, Seda Gürses, Arvind Narayanan and Vincent Toubiana Unlikely Outcomes? A Distributed Discussion on the Prospects and Promise of Decentralized Personal Data Architectures

347

APPENDICES Unlike Us Research Agenda

364

Unlike Us Conferences Unlike Us #1 in Limassol Unlike Us #2 in Amsterdam

373

Author Biographies

376

social media monopolies and their alternatives

7

8

introduction

9

A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader

/

Geert Lovink

social media Facebook web research internet users network information time public google

10

Social slogans of the day: ‘Das Ich ist nicht zu retten’, Ernst Mach – ‘I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots’, Albert Einstein – ‘I can buy a Ford, Toyota, BMW or Smart car and drive on the same roads and use the same fuel. Everything is interchangeable about them except the key that gets me in and starts the engine. It’s a good model for how our communication systems should work, at all levels’, Dave Winer – ‘Take a position, be an author’ – the European concert of networks – ‘I am inspired by the internet’, Johan Sjerpstra – ‘It is a small step from distributed to dispersion…’ – ‘Neither information nor a drug fix ever gives any happiness when you have it, but will make you miserable when you don’t’, Michel Serres – ‘I am traveling a lot, online’. Whether or not we are in the midst of yet another internet bubble, we can all agree that social media dominates the use of the internet and smartphones. The emergence of apps and web-based user-to-user services, driven by an explosion of informal dialogues, continuous uploads, and user-generated content, have greatly empowered the rise of ‘participatory culture’. At the same time, monopoly power, commercialization, and commodification are on the rise as well, with just a handful of social media platforms dominating the social web. Tensions are increasing with the question of what to make of the influence and impact of ‘social media’? Two contradictory processes – both the facilitation of free exchanges and the commercial exploitation of social relationships – seem to lie at the heart of contemporary capitalism: empowerment and control, freedom and paranoia. On the one hand new media create and expand the social spaces through which we interact, play, and even politicize ourselves; on the other hand, in most countries they are owned by literally three or four companies that have phenomenal power to shape the architectures of such interactions. Whereas the hegemonic internet ideology promises open, decentralized systems, why do we, time and again, find ourselves locked into closed, centralized environments? Why are individual users so easily lured into these corporate ‘walled gardens’? Do we understand the long-term costs that society will pay for the ease of use and simple interfaces of their beloved ‘free’ services? The accelerated growth and scope of Facebook’s social space is unheard of. As of late 2012, Facebook is said to have more than one billion active users, ranking in the top three first destination sites on the web, worldwide. Its users willingly deposit a myriad of snippets of their social life and relationships on a site that invests in an accelerated play of exchanging information. On the different platforms, from LinkedIn to Google+, we are all busy befriending, ranking, recommending, retweeting, creating circles, up-

introduction

11

loading photos and videos, and updating our status. Numerous (mobile) applications orchestrate this offer of private moments in a virtual public, seamlessly embedding the online world in the everyday life of users. Yet, despite its massive user base, the phenomenon of online social networking remains fragile. Just think of the fate of the majority of social networking sites. Who remembers Friendster? The sudden implosion (and careful recovery) of MySpace is unheard of and comes with the parallel demise of Bebo in the UK, Hyves in the Netherlands, and StudiVZ in Germany. The eventual fall of Twitter and Facebook – and Google, for that matter – is only a masterpiece of software away. This means that the ‘protocological’ future is not stationary but allows space for us to carve out a variety of technopolitical interventions. Instead of repeating the entrepreneurial-startup-transforming-into-corporate-behemoth formula, isn’t it time to reinvent the internet as a truly independent public infrastructure that can effectively defend itself against corporate domination and state control? One thing is sure: boredom will set in at some point and then the end of the befriending craze will be in sight. It will be a liberating moment to know that your friends and family will have to come up with new ways to monitor your life. After so many updates your status still hasn’t improved and we all feel the urge to waste our time elsewhere. How to study semi-closed ephemeral spaces? It is one thing to formulate a ‘black box’ theory1 to study the algorithmic cultures of such social networking websites. But what happens if the algorithms indeed remain a black box for us, non-geeks? This may happen not only because of the computer science deficiency amongst arts and humanities scholars, we are also running into very real corporate secrets and related patent wars. To a large degree, social media research is still dominated by quantitative and social scientific endeavors that play with APIs and data visualizations. In the first phase of social media research the social science focus, led by danah boyd, has been on the moral panic around young people, privacy, and identity theft. From the self-representation theories of Erving Goffman’s 1959 study to Michael Foucault’s Technologies of the Self, and graph-based network theory that focuses on influencers and (news)hubs, a range of studies and approaches have become available. What is missing so far is a rigorous discussion of the political economy of these social media monopolies. It remains hard for scholars and experts across the board to get a handle on the money/value flows. What price do we pay for the free use of services such as Facebook and Google? What we first need to acknowledge is social media’s double nature. Dismissing social media as neutral platforms with no power is as implausible as considering social media the bad boys of capitalism. The beauty and depth of social media is that they call for a new understanding of classic dichotomies such as commercial/political, informal networks/public at large, users/producers, artistic/standardized, original/copy, and democratizing/disempowering. Instead of taking these dichotomies as a point of departure, let’s scrutinize the social networking logic itself. Even if Twitter and Face-

1. See, Taina Bucher, Programmed Sociality: A Software Studies Perspective on Social Networking Sites, PhD diss., Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, 2012.

12

book were to disappear overnight, befriending, liking, and ranking would only spread further as memes, embedded in software. ‘Unfacebooking’ each individual user will take a while – unless we bet on the speed of the sudden implosion and believe in the Power of the Meme. Social media platforms are too big and too fluid to research – not just because of the sheer size of users, heavy traffic, closed databases, and overkill of metadata. The impossibility to reflect on them is also given by their fluid nature, presenting themselves as helpful gatekeepers of temporary personalized information flows. Would we like to freeze dry them? ‘A day in the life of Twitter?’ What we need to do is develop ways to capture processual flows (which explains our obsession with info visualization and cool statistics). The problem here is not one of mutation of the object, but one of actual disappearance. We may gain from new insights produced by the recently established ‘software studies’ discipline, but before we have gone through the literature, theorized the field and developed specific critical concepts, written down methodological considerations, and compiled datasets, the object of study has already changed dramatically or even vanished. Research runs the risk of producing nothing more than historical files filled with network assessments and other ethical considerations. In a variation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle we could say that it is not because we observe it that objects change, but because we research it. But this idealistic notion is unfortunately not the case. The main reason for research futility is our collective obsession with the impact of technology over its architecture. This is also the case with simplified, easy-to-use informal network sites. At first glance social media present themselves as the perfect synthesis of 19th century mass production (in this case of networks) and history in the making (see the 2011 Arab spring). There is surprisingly little ‘différance’ at work here. In that sense these are not postmodern machines but straightforward modernist products of the 1990s wave of digital globalization turned mass culture. The massive popularity of social media should not be seen as a ‘resurrection’ of the social after its death. The online system is not designed to encounter the Other (despite the popularity of online dating sites). We remain amongst ‘friends’. The faith of social media (if there is any) is rather to design and run defensive systems that can recreate community feelings of a lost tribe: computer generated informality. The social, that once dangerous category of class societies in the process of emancipation, has now gone defensive, facing massive budget cuts, privatizations and the depletion of public resources. The critique of the Situationists is running empty here. In this Society of the Query, Facebook is anything but spectacular. In the closed-off social media sphere the critical apparatus of representation theory only has a limited range. Instead, we need to further radicalize what Jean Baudrillard wrote about the ‘death of the social’.2 The implosion of the social in the media, as he described it, happened 20-30 years before the birth of Facebook. This move away from the messy and potentially dangerous street life of the crowds into the regulated flow of cars cleared urban public space, and made way for post-Fordistic interactivity inside the confined spheres of apartments, cafes, and offices. The renaissance of the fashionable concept ‘social’ in Web 2.0 was not part of a retromania to revive the 20th century Social Question. There is no class

2. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Masses: Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History 16.3 (Spring, 1985): 1, www.jstor.org/stable/468841.

introduction

13

struggle here. The very idea of social media is not to return before the Omega Point of History, circumventing Hiroshima and Auschwitz while continuing the Human Story at some other point. In this case the social is produced for no other reason than to extract value. The Social Media Question circles around notions such as aggregation, data mining, and profiling. The algorithmic exploitation of human-machine interaction consciously takes the risk that the dark of the social (mob behavior aiming at system suicide) can be managed. Considering the wide and ambitious effort that is made here, it seems important to narrow down what precisely is meant with the term ‘social media’. Some would go back to the days of early cyberculture and stress the public domain aspect of these ‘virtual communities’. This somewhat Catholic term lost its hegemony in the late 90s when startup firms, backed by venture capital and ‘silly money’ from investment banks and pension funds, flooded the scene. In this Golden Age of Dotcommania the emphasis shifted away from the internet as a public domain towards the image of an electronic shopping mall. Users were no longer seen as global citizens of cyberspace and were instead addressed as customers. This came to a sudden halt in 2000/2001 when the dotcom crash unleashed a global financial crisis. This coincided with the surveillance crackdown after 9/11 that had major implications for internet freedom. In an effort to reconstitute its dominance in the world IT market, Silicon Valley was forced to re-invent itself and unleash a renaissance movement called Web 2.0. This reincarnation of American entrepreneurial energy put the user in the driver’s seat in order to maximize its dominance in the crucial ‘mainstreaming’ phase of internet culture that was due to the role out of broadband and the arrival of mobile internet. The central slogan of the Web 2.0 era was ‘user-generated content’, with Google as the main player making profit off this shift away from the production and purchase of paid content towards the exploitation of user data. From blogging to photo sharing and social networking, the idea was to reduce complexity and user freedom in exchange for easy-to-use interfaces, free services without subscription and large database with free content, and user profiles to browse through. Whereas Web 2.0 ideology stresses the variety of startups through popular news sites from the U.S. west coast such as TechCrunch and Hacker News, but also Slashdot, Wired, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, various activities of O’Reilly publishers, and conferences such as SXSW (Austin) and LeWeb (Paris), the term ‘social media’ indicates a next stage characterized by consolidation and integration. When we talk about social media we essentially refer to the main two players: Facebook (the social hangout place) and Twitter (for short and fast news exchanges), and perhaps also LinkedIn (for professional networks) and Google+ (for the techies). While this reduction is done in an unconscious manner, it perfectly illustrates the desire to agree on a common standard of communication (knowing that this is not really possible in this still dynamic environment). Social media indicate a shift from HTML-based linking practices of the open web to liking and recommendation, which happen inside closed systems. The indirect and superficial ‘like economy’ keeps users away from a basic understanding of what the open web is all about. Information acts such as befriending, liking, recommendation, and updating social media, introduce new layers between you and others. The result is, for instance, reducing complex social relationships into a flat world (as described well

14

by Zadie Smith) in which there are only ‘friends’. Google + was initiated in response to this positive, New Age worldview without antagonisms. This is the contradiction of the democratized internet: whereas many benefit from simple technology, we all suffer from the cost of the same simplicity. Facebook is popular because of its technical and social limitations. This brings us to the need for a better understanding of interfaces and software that is now stored in the Cloud. We cannot access the code anymore, a movement which could be seen as part of the ‘war on the general purpose computer’ as described by Cory Doctorow at the 28th Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin (December 2011).3 Whereas we demand open data, use open source browsers, and argue over net neutrality and copyright, ‘walled gardens’ like Facebook close the world of technological development and move towards ‘personalization’ in which messages outside of your horizon will never enter your information ecology. Another important watershed between Web 2.0 and social media is the arrival of smartphones and apps. Web 2.0 was still entirely PC-based. Social media rhetoric emphasizes mobility: people have their favorite social media apps installed on their phone and carry them around wherever they are. This leads to info overload, addiction, and a further closure of the internet that only favors real-time mobile applications, pulling us further into accelerated historical energy fields such as the financial crisis, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements. In July 2011 the Unlike Us research network was launched, dedicated to social media monopolies and their alternatives, founded by our Institute of Network Cultures (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) in collaboration with Korinna Patelis (Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol). The launch event took place in Cyprus on November 28, 2011. A two and a half day conference with workshops happened in Amsterdam, March 8-10, 2012.4 The events, blog, forum, list, reader and other outlets deal with a range of topics (some of them listed below), inviting theoretical, empirical, practical, and artbased contributions. Unlike Us anticipates the need for specialized workshops and so-called barcamps, realizing that its agenda is diverse and can take the initiative in a variety of directions – up to the danger of fragmentation. Let’s move on from the question so often heard inside firms, NGOs, government departments, and (vocational) education, about how best to utilize Facebook and Twitter. In contrast with social science scholars around Christian Fuchs discussing the (Marxist) political economy of social media5, Unlike Us is primarily interested in a broad arts and humanities angle also called web aesthetics (as described by Vito Campanelli6), activist use, and the need to discuss both big and small alternatives, and does not limit itself to academic research. We see critique and alternatives as intrinsically related and both guided by an aesthetic agenda. Another Social Network is Possible. However, no matter how understandable the need for practical how-to information is, including

3. Cory Doctorow, ‘Lockdown: The Coming War on General-purpose Computing’, Boing Boing, 10 January 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html. 4. For more information on the Unlike Us network, the related email list, upcoming conferences, and workshops, including the blog and (academic) publications see, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/ unlikeus/. 5. See, http://www.icts-and-society.net/events/uppsala2012/. 6. Vito Campanelli, Web Aesthetics, Rotterdam: INC/NAi Publishers, 2010.

introduction

15

the need to spread information about alternative platforms, our research cannot stop there. Expect in this reader to go back to the basics sometimes. Should we reassess the centralized model or continue to argue for decentralized models? Is the distributed ‘federated social web’ some sort of Third Way alternative? For more information on the original intentions of the network we included, in the appendix of this reader, the Unlike Us research agenda, put together in July 2011 by a group of people who collaboratively wrote this text online in the network’s early stages.7 One and a half years into the history of Unlike Us the agenda is becoming more clear, and focused, but real choices still have to be made. Hopefully there is light at the end of tunnel of the fundamental conceptual and strategic debates of the moment. You can feel there is something at stake. Discussing the latest research trends we can see a growing tiredness over the ‘exploitation’ thesis of social media in favor of a more detailed analysis of the ‘like economy’ on the one hand, and the desire to design alternatives on the other. The critical mass advantage of Facebook and Twitter is wearing out, but how can alternative platforms become more successful? The monopoly position and related control-mania is becoming too obvious and a banality to present as a research outcome. Power patterns in the IT industry, from IBM and Microsoft to Google and Facebook are becoming well-known. Ordinary users do not want to look uncool and cannot afford to be left out in this informal reputation economy; this is why they feel forced to follow the herd. We all still have to get used to the two faces of networked reality: networks are both ideal to scale-up quickly so that early movers can create new publics, and, cashed-up with venture capital take over a technology or application in no time. And, in contrast to this aspect of speed and size, there is always also the distributed and decentralized, informal quasi-private side of networks. Lately, social media companies have emphasized the first and neglected the second, obsessed as they are by hyper-growth at all costs. It is time for designers, programmers, and geeks and nerds of all nations to step in, realize the dark sides of corporate-state control and become active. Either the startup cult will have to be radically reformed or blown up all together. Hopefully, this reader can play a role in this process. Amsterdam, October 2012

References Campanelli, Vito. Web Aesthetics, Rotterdam: INC/NAi Publishers, 2010. Doctorow, Cory. ‘Lockdown:, The Coming War on General-purpose Computing’, Boing Boing, 10 January 2012, , http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The Masses: Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History 16.3 (Spring, 1985): 1, www.jstor.org/stable/468841. Bucher, Taina. ‘Programmed Sociality: A Software Studies Perspective on Social Networking Sites’, PhD diss., Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, 2012.

7. Contributors to the initial Unlike Us call: Marc Stumpel, Sabine Niederer, Vito Campanelli, Ned Rossiter, Michael Dieter, Oliver Leistert, Taina Bucher, Gabriella Coleman, Ulises Mejias, Anne Helmond, Lonneke van der Velden, Morgan Currie, Eric Kluitenberg, and the initiators Geert Lovink and Korinna Patelis.

16

The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies

/

Bernard Stiegler

social networks individuation philia friendship psychical time way technology collective process individual relational meaning group

theory of social media

17

What we usually call ‘social networks’ – a paradoxical appellation, as we shall see, – lie at the core of what constitutes the social.1 The appellation itself is paradoxical since we are talking here about digital networks which appear to shortcut the traditional networks of proximity that have defined what is social from times immemorial. And we will easily admit that they are core to the social when following Aristotle who said that they pertain to the philia, itself the fundament of the social. Aristotle tells us – and all traditions currently in vogue, including Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship follow him in this respect – that friendship (i.e. philia) is the paramount social link without which society would not exist. Jean Lauxerois, however, strongly disagreed with translating philia with friendship. I did not follow him, initially. But reflecting on social networks I ended up seeing that he was right:2 – Firstly because there is actually a Greek word for friendship: ‘philotès’, – Secondly because Aristotle states that each and every animated living being partakes in a philia with its kin.3 Philia, writes Lauxerois, is more than mere friendship the way we understand it. It designates the way every living being, whether human or animal, is by necessity bound to other living beings from the moment he or she comes to the world.4 Philia was according to Aristotle what bonded humans, yet humans, again according to Aristotle, represented only one particular case of philia. — In order to clarify this first point, especially where we would like to enquire whether new forms of friendship arise through what we call social networks, or more generally, new forms of philia, I suggest we make a detour in the company of Jacob von 1. Translated from the French by Patrice Riemens. Originally published in Bernard Stiegler (ed.) Réseaux sociaux: Culture politique et ingénierie des réseaux sociaux, Collection du Nouveau Monde Industriel, Limoges: FYP éditions, 2012. 2. For further analysis and argument see, Bernard Stiegler, Veux-tu devenir mon ami? (‘Do you want to become my friend?’), forthcoming. 3. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Philia et philotès (http://iri.tw/a). 4. Jean Lauxerois, ‘Postface à Aristote’, in Aristote, L’Amicalité, Chapitres VIII et IX de Ethique à Nicomaque, trans. Jean Lauxerois, Garches: Éditions À propos, 2002, p. 84.

18

Uexküll. His description includes one aspect of animal philia as the fundamentally open possibility of adoption: Gregarious jackdaws have around them their entire lives a “companion” [“socius”] with whom they undertake all sorts of actions. Even if a jackdaw is brought up alone, it does not go without the companion but, if it cannot find one of its own species, it takes on a “substitute companion,” and, in fact, a new substitute companion can fill that gap for each new activity. In its youth, the jackdaw Tschock had [his owner] Lorenz himself as its mothercompanion. It followed him all over the place; it called to him when it wanted to be fed. Once it had learned to get its own feed, it chose the maid as its companion and performed the characteristic courtship dance in front of her. Later, it found a young jackdaw which became its adoptive companion and which Tschock fed. Whenever Tschock prepared for a longer flight, it attempted to persuade Lorenz to fly with it in typical jackdaw fashion, by flying straight up just behind his back. When that did not work, it joined flying crows, who then became its flight companions [“socii”]. 5 According to Lauxerois, Aristotle states: philia should be regarded as pertaining both to animals of the same sort, say birds, as to members of the same family – but also to the relationships that obtain between and within different human communities – like city-states.6 Now, if it is possible for jackdaws to adopt living beings who are not fellow species as equal to themselves, we must ask ourselves what it is exactly that constitutes the philia of those who can become friends. By friends we mean those beings who can be affected by love, desire, and absence – of which the desired object (conceptualized by Lacan as ‘le manque’, ‘the lack’) is always an experience. And from there, to individuate themselves in this affection, by which they become psychically individuated, and in that, singularly affected. In Simondon’s terms, this issue pertains to the passage of vital individuation to psychical and collective individuation. Vital individuation, writes Simondon: […] can take place either at the level of an individual being, or through the organic relationship which exists between different beings. In the latter case, internal integration within the individual being is augmented with and by external integration: the group functions as integrator. Vital unity constitutes then the sole concrete reality, and this can consist in some cases of a single individual, and in others of a very differentiated group of multiple individuals.7 I

5. Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 111. 6. Jean Lauxerois, ‘Postface à Aristote’, p. 84. 7. Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, second edition, Jérôme Million, Paris: Paris Universitaires de France, 1997, p. 156 (quote translated).

theory of social media

19

n a note, Simondon goes on to describe the very specific philia of the white ants: Despite their rather simple neuronal constitution, white ants build the most elaborate structures found in the animal world: working as a group, they act as if they were one single organism.8 We must therefore think in terms of vital individuation as a process, rather than in terms of (the nature of) living individuals: What in biology is called an individual is actually a sub-individual rather than an individual; it is as if in biology, individuality should be seen as having many layers, depending on successive levels of individuation […] Not the single individual, but the group as a whole should be regarded as the vital unit.9 Individuation seen this way results in another conception of philia, and of what is tentatively understood under this term. It relates to the grouping together of (all kinds of) plant or animal life, of cells agglomerating into one body, corals, colonies of all sorts, herds, gangs, pairs of animals – all this would typically result in vital individuation in relation to physical individuation. But vital individuation consists in a banding together of individuals without becoming a community plagued by a community deficit which, according to George Bataille, is the hallmark of those who are susceptible to friendship – the deficit of community where psychical phenomena arise which belong to what Canguilhelm called technical life, with another word: humans. Contrary to psychical and collective, or social individuation, vital individuation is always a bonding, and with no possibility of disjunction other than a teratological one or one caused from outside. And, as opposed to this vital individuation, psychical and collective individuation, at the same time, fit and unfit the community of those who are bereft of a community, meaning an individuation that is at the same time always augmented yet also diminished by technical individuation – that is the individuation of the sort of beings that we are, or at least try to be, or that we believe to be in our attempt to share a common future, a future which we would like to be friendly, or which we would like to be able to believe to be friendly, especially with regard to the expansion of what we call ‘social networks’ – psychical and collective individuation becomes, contrarily to vital individuation, an alteration: a becoming-other, in the presence of the other, of the big Other, that is, existing under the condition which Freud first, and then Lacan, called das Ding. — Whatever may be said about these translation issues – and whatever may be said about the precise difference between philia and philotès, between philia as animal adoption and philia as human adoption, within which friendship, in the sense of philotès, would be only a specific instance – in order to be part of a social network which originated in

8. Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, note 1 (quote translated). 9. Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, p. 157 (quote translated).

20

social engineering,10 meaning the sophisticated relational technologies that are ‘social networks’, one should first describe what this relational technology calls your ‘network of friends’ – ‘friends’ which should be better understood in the sense of ‘contacts’, not even ‘acquaintances’, but rather addressees and carriers of one’s ‘reputation’, by way of the network effect of networks which makes the ‘friends’ of my ‘friends’ automatically my ‘friends’. We should also enquire here about these reputation technologies – which according to Howard Rheingold are sophisticated relational technologies of social engineering – by taking what the (ancient) Greeks called the kleos11 as our starting point. Kleos is variously translated as reputation, glory, posterity, rumor, etc., but we lack room and time here to pursue this further. And another very pressing issue would be to analyze how this ‘network effect’ precisely affects this type of ‘network of networks’ which, I would think, does nicely correspond to what Aristotle understood as philia amongst mortal, noetic beings, also known by moderns as ‘humans’. The description of one’s ‘network of friends’ such as is demanded by the relational technology of social networks requires that one formally includes other members of the network in one’s own network, themselves having therefore also agreed with this declarative and descriptive procedure. By (formally) declaring our ‘friends’ and our ‘friendship’, and also operating a selection among our friends, acquaintances, and contacts of all sorts, here all lumped together under the appellation ‘friends’, we trigger a profound alteration under what used to be understood as social networks: friends, family and relatives, acquaintances, chums, pals, old social structures, the very ones creating those networks and depending on them at the same time, etc. And thus we were already included in these social networks, but without really realizing it so much. But now we see ourselves drawn into these relational technologies, which suddenly leads us to make them explicit, and at the same time to profoundly change them, and sometimes even to abandon them altogether with regard to those whom we now call our friends. Therefore, I think we should consider them rather as the sort of philia we see amongst animals, like Tschock the jackdaw or white ants in their anthills. I am repeating here an hypothesis already voiced in my book De la Misère Symbolique 1 where I suggest that digital technologies, in so far as they generalize traceability, could well return humanity’s behavior to the level of synchronized arthropods moving around under the sway of the chemical pheromones emitted continuously by all members of the colony. It is here that the translation issue raised by Lauxerois would take its full meaning: are digital, also known as social, networks a philia regressing us to the state of insects, or do they constitute a novel opportunity to achieve this elusive philotès among humans? And in order to dramatize the issue even further, let us look at what Aristotle had to say about what philia is when it is human:

10. English used in the French original. (Note from translator.) 11. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Régression ou évolution (http://iri.tw/8).

theory of social media

21

Philia is the most necessary thing in life, since nobody would choose to live without it, even in the possession of all other goods.12 Here, Aristotle is crystal clear: among humans, and in its manifestation as friendship, philia is the most precious good. It is the most precious good for individual human beings, because without it, life is not worth living.13 But it is also the most precious good for societies for the simple reason that it constitutes their very basic feature, as linking power, which also means as power to create the solidarity that spawns relational threads, or in other words, social networks. — These friends – whose chance encounter makes us so happy, just as the unexpected things that arise from the encounter, like Bouvard meeting Pecuchet on a bench – these friends then, and the networks that form around them and thanks to them, are precisely what the Facebook entry procedures demand from us to declare, before any relation can be established, but also only after we have duly given our email address and chosen a password. It is thus in no way different from making a statement at the police station – it is a formalization, a publication, in the sense of making public. Such a construct whereby friendship is declared, formalized, and made public invites many, many questions – including ones on its perfectly performative character: if one declares someone to be one’s friend, one in a certain sense makes him or her a friend, and forces her or him to be one. Yet it would seem that if there is something essential to a friendship-based relationship, it is precisely to escape formalization and publicity, but on the contrary to contribute to the existence of a group of what is called intimi, people one is intimate with, or, more broadly speaking, the circle of familiar faces. ‘No fuss between us’ is typically something one says when establishing the bonds of friendship, switching for instance from the polite to the informal address, as promptly do Bouvard and Pecuchet after their chance encounter.14 However, maybe the situation is still more complex in nature, as I will try to show. Maybe friendships always carried with them a public, if not an explicit, declaration, precisely because friendship very often lies at the origin of a social network. Such a social network could be very small, and the public declaration could even have a more narrowly limited reach pertaining to the most intimate of relationships, constituting what Lacan called the extime (‘exteem’).15 Now, besides all these considerations, what is Facebook actually, apart from the fact that it is, as Alain Seban has mentioned, a social network that has grown at a rate of 12. Paraphrased from the famous passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 1. (Note from translator). 13. And it presupposes the other form of philia which antedates friendship: maternal and filial love. See, Bernard Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue. De la pharmacologie, Paris: Flammarion, 2010 (What makes life worth living: On pharmacology). 14. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Facebook ou l’amitié déclarée, (http://iri.tw/6). 15. Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller (eds) Le Séminaire XVI: D’un autre à l’Autre, Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2006.

22

ten million a month since the beginning of this year and will pass hundred million users after August 25?16 Well, to start with the beginning, as one says informally, that is to say among friends, and to say so in a non-Aristotelian language: Facebook has a mode of functioning based on two features: 1. creating a profile, which amounts to a kind of self-description through one’s relations, 2. dialogue, which constitutes a process of sociation in terms of collective individuation. — Everybody is aware of the fact that the profiling feature is problematic insofar as it is nowadays being made use of by advertisers to target ‘potentials’ in the most precise way possible – let’s call that surgical marketing. The self-profiling function could of course be an exercise in reflexivity for the person practicing it, but it has as principal effect to bring the new member of this type of network to declare his or her social belonging as if he or she were an ethnographer, and to thereby engage, if not in auto-ethnography, then at least in an auto-sociography by declaring and writing his or her network attachments – especially concerning friendships, but also interests of all kinds, including the most trivial and venal ones – all through a digital script mechanism. I do believe that this self-indexation feature could be of major social significance, and could even trigger a renewal of social life – which is in bad shape by the way, we can’t deny that much. I do believe that the reflexivity included in the public declaration of relationships (friendly and otherwise) could lead, if intelligently put to work by communities and collective intelligence networks like Facebook and others, to the emergence of a process of psychical, collective and technical individuation, which would indeed make for a relationally peaceful or benevolent 21st century, grounded in – if I dare to say – a new benevolence (i.e. goodwill), even if it would not be ‘friendly’ in the strict sense of the term.17 Others would probably say that the social is not in very good shape precisely be­-cause of these technologies which destroy it at the same time as they formalize it. So it may be. Such a mechanism indeed allows for meta-formalizations, the extraction of rules, but also of computations, which would lead to a computation-imposed destruction of existence – whereas friendship always supersedes such computations, hence the ‘no fuss between us’, (meaning no trucks involving money, no cunning moves big or small, the reason why one often hears that ‘in business there are no friends’, etc.). These cunning, considered moves, when they are made for the sake of sociological or anthropological research, form the mainstay of John Barnes’ theory of social networks.18 Claude Lévi-Strauss went down the same road in order to research and

16. These remarks were made in 2008. Facebook now has over 700 million members. (Note from translator: Facebook has in the mean time hit one billion registered users). 17. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Emergence d’un XXIe siècle paisible (http://iri.tw/7). 18. See the (French) Wikipedia entry for ‘social networks’. (Note from translator: English in the original French text).

theory of social media

23

structurally formalize the social relations within the Nambikwara tribe, where he took the opportunity arising from an incident to trick the tribe’s little girls into telling their names – names which ought to have remained secret: One day, when I was playing with a group of children, a little girl was struck by one of her comrades. She ran to me for protection and began to whisper something, a “great secret”, in my ear. As I did not understand I had to ask her to repeat it over and over again. Eventually her adversary found out what was going on, came up to me in a rage, and tried in her turn to tell me what seemed to be another secret. After a little while I was able to get to the bottom of the incident. The first little girl was trying to tell me her enemy’s name, and when the enemy found out what was going on she decided to tell me the other girl’s name, by way of reprisal. Thenceforward it was easy enough, though not very scrupulous, to egg the children on, one against the other, till in time I knew all of their names. When this was completed and we were all, in a sense, one another’s accomplices, I soon got them to give me the adult’s names too. When this was discovered, the children were reprimanded and my sources of information dried up.19 It is from such anthropological descriptions exploring the hidden relationships instrumental in the establishment of social relations – one could also mention here the works of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who formalized the grammar of the Hopi Indians, very much against their wish20 – that we may arrive at a better understanding of the social as a set of relational rules, and even be able to make it more dense, to strengthen, as it were, the modalities of the exercise of the philia. And now I am coming to believe that the same kind of descriptions, if done through this system of auto-anthropology that is a social network like Facebook, could also lead to a form of reflexive individuation.21 But if so, under what conditions? — It is through science, be it anthropology or linguistics, or law – since law is what formalizes social rules – that we should arrive at a kind of reflexive philia, which could be understood as the hallmark of political societies. Political societies arose with the Greek polis, which was grounded in public law, itself declared, described, and made explicit according to a strict set of rules in the sense that they were grounded in citizenship as a formally constituted friendship bond, which itself was formally declared and based on public law which was simply the entry condition into a social group called polis, and then civitas, and finally nation. This, of course, is a network of networks itself also grounded in a technology that makes relations explicit, namely writing. In fact, nowadays, the arrival of a new member of the community, commonly called birth, must absolutely and always lead to a declaration to a registrar (of birth and death), who at the same time formalizes a family network by putting it down in writ-

19. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell, New York: Criterion Books, 1961, p. 270. 20. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Linguistique et anthropologie, Paris: Gonthier Denoël, 1956. 21. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Individuation réflexive (http://iri.tw/b).

24

ing. These written and hence formal archives accompany a person, in circumstances happy or unfortunate, for the time of his or her life. There would be no historians without them. Writing is a mnemotechnic for formalizing relationships. It starts with the most elementary relational organ all humans share: the language. This is why the Hopis didn’t want their language to be grammatized: they knew it would destroy their very culture. And yet, wouldn’t Hopi society, which so fascinated Aby Warburg, have had a better future if anthropology had been able to offer another modality of grammatization, that is, a discretized formalization of its relational flows – the kind of flows through which social networks arise which constitute a social group? Whatever is the case, it is clear that citizenship forming is grounded on the descriptive grammatization of social relationships by way of the written script in the service of an intensification of the psychical individuation of each citizen, and through him of her, of the other citizens, leading by progressive extension, to collective individuation. This in turn leads to a particular process of trans-individuation, which simply amounts to the writing of history, itself leading to the specific social dynamic which we call the Occident. — I call a process of trans-individuation that which ensures that during the course of a social relationship, something that is always, in Simondon’s words, an assemblage of psychical individuations socially co-individuating each other (and not only in the psychical sense), and this through processes of dual co-individuation,22 meaning individuation by two people at a time,23 of which friendship and love are exquisite and necessary instances for the formation of the psychical individual (reason why childhood friendships are so important, and why Wilhelm Meister’s friendship fascinates us so much), a process of meta-stabilization exists, during this co-individuation, which leads it towards what would be called in neuronal network theory an attractor, through which a certain type of relations gets built up as norm. This implies that trans-individuation is not simple co-individuation: it is what is bound to become the rule of the network, a rule more efficient as it is unconscious most of the time. Such a trans-individuation results in what Simondon calls the trans-individual, and the trans-individual is what meta-stabilizes meanings. Meanings make for a world by giving it an understanding shared by those who individuate and co-individuate themselves in it by making its meaning evolve, thereby transforming what was a simple network in a true world, within which a process of collective and psychical individuation is triggered among those who form this networkworld, and bonds them together under the seal of friendship, that is with the force of the bonds constituting friendship.

22. On ‘the dual’ see, Alain Badiou, De l’amour, Paris: Flammarion, 1999. 23. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Transindividuation (http://iri.tw/g).

theory of social media

25

So if the written script constitutes an individuation regime which allows for the intensification of the evolution that is collective individuation by enhancing psychical individuation and thereby strengthening the social bond, it can also lead, as Michel Foucault has shown, to a process of subjectivation, which actually is a sujétion, or submission, leading in turn to de-subjectification and disindividuation. This is particularly true of what Foucault termed disciplinary societies, where the power not only ‘files’ all behaviors, but also documentalizes individuals in order to submit their whole life, in all its aspects, to control by way of writing. This is what Foucault called bio-power (‘biopouvoir’). Characteristic of the bio-power is the test – school-test or health-check – which is foremost a disciplinary and a surveillance technique. As Foucault states, ‘The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation […] The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’,24 and which constitutes also a ‘power of writing’. Now, even if the ‘Edvige’-project25 reminded us of something already noted in the Nora-Minc report26 on the informatization of society, namely digitization and the ensuing traceability – the expansion of what the authors propose to call ‘telematics’ – represent a considerable risk to individual and collective liberties, the big issue, the truly new issue, is not so much about state and police control, but about the control which marketing attempts to exercise on behaviors through the set-up of systems of self-description of social relations. If inclined to pessimism, one might fear that they inevitably will lead to a new form of computer-assisted, self-inflicted slavery – a digital anthill. In which case we will face something greater than a bio-power: a psycho-power, or to be even more precise,27 a psycho-socio-power.28 — I must immediately clarify that I am not out to simply reduce social networks to police instruments, nor to simple marketing instruments. Neither am I out to demonize police or marketing as such. I rather would like to show that social networks represent a stage within a process of grammatization, which leads to the grammatization of social relations as such. I call grammatization the process of formalization and discretization which permits, on one hand, the reproduction of what is discretized, and on the other, operations, of computing or control, and finally, a reflexivity, or critique, of what can be iterated, 24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, p. 189. 25. A comprehensive French police registry project, finally abandoned in the wake of massive protests. (Note from translator). 26. Simon Nora and Alain Minc, L’Informatisation de la société, Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1997. 27. See Bernard Stiegler in conversation with Philippe Petit and Vincent Bontems, Economie de l’hypermateriel et psychopouvoir, Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008. 28. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Le risque de prise en main du Marketing (http://iri.tw/d).

26

and which, by way of its iteration, is able to produce a difference, meaning also an individuation, meaning then again, a difference.29 Now, being a grammatization of social relations, like all grammatizations, social networks are a pharmacologic phenomenon because they allow both for disindividuation as well as for the intensification of individuation.30 This is where the dialogue function on Facebook should be helpful – if only trans-individuation applications were installed on it, something that, as far as I know at present, is entirely lacking. Social networks are therefore essential components of what Deleuze called control and modulation societies – and they push them further forward. But let us not forget that Deleuze sometimes speculated about an art of the control, and that his primary concern was not to do away with control, but to do something with it – if not to take control of it. The fact that social networks make disindividuation worse, not so much through police control, but through the behavioral control exercised by marketing, represents a possible disindividuation which could be countered, but only if one is able to reverse the pharmacologic direction of social networks. All this is not about preventing or denying the existence of social networks, or ignoring the dangers they represent. It is foremost about inventing the future of social networks, in social networks, and with social networks. But this is only possible if we are able to arrive at an understanding of these networks which are at the same time technological and social, and to attain such an understanding as to make these networks capable of becoming agents of reflexivity – for instance as agents of the reflexive modernity Ulrich Beck invoked more than twenty years ago, after the Chernobyl catastrophe. — I just used the word catastrophe, a word that has become commonplace these days, yet should not be used in vain. All the same, and before proceeding any further, I would like to posit here that if Chernobyl was a great catastrophe (and in the meanwhile we also have witnessed the catastrophe at Fukushima), we now discover many more catastrophes, all inviting us to think about other mediations regarding this ‘reflexive modernity’, or, to use a more open formula, to think about a new industrial civilization, something which would drag us out of our seemingly present state of industrial decadence. Here, I am thinking more specifically about catastrophes that are psychical, social, and also those between generations, something young people suffer more and more from due to the slow, but undeniable, erosion of the social networks which existed before the digital social networks, like the family, school, neighbors, citizenship, mediating organizations, etc. This erosion comes as the consequence of the excessive influence of psycho-power buttressed by psycho-technologies which multiply all kinds of networks. The worst 29. On these issues, see Bernard Stiegler, Bêtise et savoir au XIXème siècle. Pharmacologie de l’université, Paris: Fayard, 2012. 30. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Réseaux sociaux, poison ou remède (http://iri.tw/9).

theory of social media

27

culprit, I think, is the television network, which short-cuts the traditional social network, the one which, by virtue of its inter-generational nature, for millennia took care of a familiar reticularity, that philia without which no society can exist, and which has led to a kind of psychical and at the same time collective disindividuation. Thus, beyond these psycho-technologies, socio-technologies, or rather, psycho-socio-technologies appear together with social networks. I have shown elsewhere how, in our very complex times, this disindividuation goes together with a destruction of inter-generational bonds, and also with a technology of massive capturing of psychical attention.31 Yet, as one knows, attention is not only a psychical, but also a social thing. Social attention means civility, urbanity, the common politeness whose name is derived from polis, that is politics in its most friendly and peaceful garb possible. For so far it is true that the opposite of a friend is a foe, and that the common relationship amongst foes is war. The gambit of social networks constituting the digital grammatization of the social – which of course goes together with metadata technologies and innumerable other facets of the formalization of trans-individuation processes – is the mutation we should achieve regarding putting to work techniques of formation and the capture of psychical as well as of social attention, in the form of relational technologies. My fundamental thesis on these issues in general is, that precisely what creates processes of disindividuation, that is of the destruction of the social, is what, by the very virtue of its grammatization, is also the one and only road towards the invention of new forms of individuation.32 And this is the viewpoint that informs all the activities and research and development at Centre Pompidou’s Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI). However, such a position is only achievable by first operating a pharmacological critique of its objects – and that is what I shall attempt to sketch as a conclusion by stressing that the gambit of such an exercise amounts to no less than the dilemma: war or peace, and this within a phenomenon presently emerging that I call the inter-nation.33 — If social networks are an extraordinary example of Simondon’s theory, following which one can only psychically individuate by individuating collectively, contemporary society then suffers from a social disindividuation which has liquidated what used to be called social networks – networks grounded in inter-generational, ancestral relationships. Looking through this prism, one is tempted to think we can observe the emergence – through Facebook and so many other socio-technological modes of mediations,

31. Bernard Stiegler, Prendre soin. De la jeunesse et des générations, Paris: Flammarion, 2008. (‘Taking care. On youth and generations’). 32. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Vers une nouvelle forme d’individuation (http://iri.tw/e). 33. For the concept of inter-nation see, Bernard Stiegler, Bêtise et savoir au XIXème siècle.

28

including networked games – of non-social networks, substitutes for true social networks: pharmaka of social networks, ersatz, simulacra, make-believes and make-dos for the absence of social reality. They are a ‘cure’ for the lack of social relations, just as games are a relief for the social desert in which young adults live – as was well demonstrated by Thomas Gaon in the workshop Desire and Technology organized by Mathilde Girard at IRI.34 One is then tempted to think that the cure these young adults administer themselves might well be worse than the disease – maybe erroneously, that is, if one enquires no further. Yes, it is the young adults who develop the social networks, and who find in these technologies a way to reconstitute what they miss so dearly: namely, a philia. But a young adult needs the gaze of another young adult, of a peer – and that is exactly what these networks provide. This is why ‘peer-to-peer’35 has taken such a flight, and the internet is an ideal medium to develop such parity-based relationships. But for us at IRI, peer-to-peer has also imposed itself because nowadays youths no longer wish to be mere consumers, they want to act and to practice, and that is a good thing. They want to individuate, both psychically and collectively.36 It is within this general (and generous) context that we also should take notice of the fact that a social network is also a space of construction of what Freud called the ‘secondary processes of identification’, which normally take place within a proximitybased social network, i.e. within the philia constituting a device of the familial, or tribal, or clannish, or rural, or urban type, which are also political, etc. And as far as the present public domain is concerned – which is now by and large digitized and consists of psycho-socio-technological networks, given that all previous structures have fallen apart in the meanwhile – let us take good notice that it allows numerous young adults to break loose from the television networks. These have become, in their eyes, the stamping ground of adults, who they actually consider as minors, since their parents have more often than not become infantilized by the transformation of their psyche in a repository of ‘disposable brain-time’,37 a situation contemporary youth wants to counter by developing its own relational, if not truly social, space. Why this proviso? Because I do not believe that a social network in general, and a socio-technological network in particular could ever be able, by itself, to foster the formation of a social group. And also because I believe that the real issue is about the arrangement of social networks with social groups (since a social network without a social group is equivalent to a mafia). Such an arrangement is not only possible, but also entirely believable because a sociotechnological network is also a scripted space and hence a space of individuation. But

34. ‘Désir et technologies: Autour des jeux videos’, workshop with Thomas Gaon and Serge Tisseron, organized for the l’Institut de recherche sous la responsabilité by Mathilde Girard, 26 June 2008. 35. English in the original. (Note from translator). 36. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Adolescents acteurs (http://iri.tw/h). 37. (In)famous statement by a commercial broadcasting director to express how he was looking at the channel’s audience. (Note from translator).

theory of social media

29

in order to actually be possible, a socio-technological network should also be intergenerational, or, to put it more precisely: a social group should constitute itself as an inter-generational arrangement of socio-psycho-technological networks.38 There are all kinds of socio-technological networks, and Facebook is only one instance of them. Many of these networks have been invested by adults for the purpose of pursuing various foci of interest – ranging from professional activities to religious beliefs, and innumerable other types and forms of life experience in between. The grammatization represented by social networks is bound to take in, in its time, all forms of traditional social networks, the way immigration networks too have been connecting to socio-technological ones. We, at the Research and Innovation Institute of the Centre Pompidou, take a very political stance with respect to modern culture, and for us, this entails that we, as adults, must take up in the most attentive, but also must generous way, our responsibilities in matters of the development of socio-technological networks. They should become networks for the production of maturity and majority (majorité) in the Kantian sense of the word: adult networks, networks where young adults are enabled to find their path towards adulthood, transforming from minors into adults in the process, a thing that has become extremely difficult in an age where adults themselves have become so dramatically infantilized. For that, we need to create policed, meaning politicized communities of friends in the social networks.39 These communities should be civic in the sense that they take a critical stance regarding the conditions of their individuation. This project should be conducted according to a pharmacological conception of the network, where, for instance, it should be perfectly feasible to go on the networks in order to counter anything on these very same networks that stands in the way of their concretization as a process of psychical, technological, and collective individuation. It is necessary to develop communities of theoretical and practical knowledge on and in the networks, to establish spaces of critique, and for this, to invent a much needed political technology, which requires in its turn an advanced understanding of metadataware, based on polemical trans-individuation technologies, and by organizing logical controversies that are at the same time peaceful, well-meaning, and based on voluntary contribution. This is what we are working on at the IRI.

References Badiou, Alain. De l’amour, Paris: Flammarion, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Lacan, Jacques and Jacques-Alain Miller (eds). Le Séminaire XVI: D’un autre à l’Autre, Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2006.

38. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Du réseau social au groupe social (http://iri.tw/f). 39. See the lecture held by Bernard Stiegler, ‘Désir et relation sociale à l’époque du social engineering’, ENMI 2008, Communautés critiques (http://iri.tw/e).

30

Lauxerois, Jean. ‘Postface à Aristote’, in Aristote, L’Amicalité, Chapitres VIII et IX de Ethique à Nicomaque, trans. Jean Lauxerois, Garches : Éditions À propos, 2002. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell, New York: Criterion Books, 1961. Nora, Simon and Alain Minc. L’Informatisation de la société, Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1997. Petit, Philippe and Vincent Bontems. Economie de l’hypermateriel et psychopouvoir, Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008. Stiegler, Bernard. Prendre soin. De la jeunesse et des générations, Paris: Flammarion, 2008. ______. Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine d’être vécue. De la pharmacologie, Paris: Flammarion, 2010. ______ (ed.) Réseaux sociaux: Culture politique et ingénierie des réseaux sociaux, Collection du Nouveau Monde Industriel, Limoges: FYP éditions, 2012. ______. Bêtise et savoir au XIXème siècle. Pharmacologie de l’université, Paris: Fayard, 2012. von Uexküll, Jacob. A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, second edition, Jérôme Million, Paris: Paris Universitaires de France, 1997. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Linguistique et Anthropologie, Paris: Gonthier Denoël, 1956.

theory of social media

31

Against Remediation

/

David M. Berry

data media computational software web code google user bugs time technologies remediation information

32

In contemporary life, the social is a site for a particular form of technological focus and intensification. Traditional social experience has, of course, taken part in various forms of technical mediation and formatting, and has been subject to control technologies. Think, for example, of the way in which the telephone structured the conversation, diminishing the value of proximity, whilst simultaneously intensifying certain kinds of bodily response and language use. It is important, then, to trace media genealogies carefully and to be aware of the previous ways in which the technological and social have met – and this includes the missteps, mistakes, dead-ends, and dead media. This understanding of media, however, has increasingly been understood in terms of the notion of remediation, which has been considered to helpfully contribute to our thought about media change, whilst sustaining a notion of medium specificity. Bolter and Grusin, who coined its contemporary usage, state, [W]e call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old.1 However, it seems to me that we now need to move beyond talk of the remediation of previous modes of technological experience and media when we attempt to understand computational media. I think that this is important for a number of reasons, both theoretical and empirical. Firstly, in a theoretical vein, remediation has become a hegemonic concept and as such has lost its theoretical force and value. Remediation traces its intuition from McLuhan’s notion that the content of a new media is an old media – McLuhan actually thought of ‘retrieval’ as a ‘law’ of media.2 But it seems to me that beyond a fairly banal point, this move has the effect of both desensitizing us to the specificity and materiality of a ‘new’ media, and more problematically, resurrecting a form of media hauntology, in as much as the old media concepts ‘possess’ the new media form. Whilst it might have held some truth for the old ‘new’ media, although even here I am somewhat skeptical, within the context of digital, and more particularly 1. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 45. 2. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

theory of social media

33

computational media, I think the notion is increasingly unhelpful. Secondly, remediation gestures toward a depth model of media forms, within which it encourages a kind of originary media, origo, to be postulated, or even to remain latent as an a priori. This enables a form of reading of the computational that justifies a disavowal of the digital, through a double movement of simultaneously exclaiming the newness of computational media, whilst hypostatizing a previous media form ‘within’ the computational. Thirdly, I do not believe that it accurately describes the empirical situation of computational media, and in fact obfuscates the specificity of the computational in relation to its structure and form. This has a secondary effect in as much as analysis of computational media is viewed through a lens, or method, that is legitimated through this prior claim to remediation. Fourthly, I think remediation draws its force through a reliance on an ocularity, that is, remediation is implicitly visual in its conceptualization of media forms, and the way in which one media contains another, relies on a deeply visual metaphor. This is significant in relation to the hegemony of the visual form of media in the 20th century. Lastly, and for this reason, I think it is time for us to historicize the concept of remediation. Indeed remediation seems to me to be a concept appropriate to the technologies of media of the 20th century, and shaped by the historical context of thinking about media in relation to the materialities of those prior media forms, and the constellation of concepts that appeared appropriate to them. We need to think of computational media in terms that de-emphasize, or certainly reduce, the background assumptions of remediation as something akin to a looking glass, and think in terms of a medium as an agency or means of doing something – this means thinking beyond the screenic. In contrast to talk about remediation, and in the context of computational media, I want to think about de-mediation, that is, when a media form is no longer dominant, becoming marginal, and later absorbed/reconstructed in a new medium which en-mediates it. By enmediate I want to draw attention to the securing of the boundaries related to a format, that is, a representation or mimesis of a previous medium – but it is not the ‘same’, nor is it ‘contained’ in the new media. This distinction is important because at the moment of enmediation, computational categories and techniques transform the newly enmediated form – I am thinking here of the examples given by the new aesthetic and related computational aesthetics. I also want to highlight the processual nature of the enmediation; in other words, enmediation requires constant work to stabilize the enmediated media. In this sense, computational media is deeply related to enmediation as a total process of mediation through digital technologies. One way of thinking about enmediation is to understand it as gesturing towards a notion of a paradigmatic shift in the way ‘to mediate’ should be understood, and which does not relate to the ‘passing through’ or ‘informational transfer’ as such. Rather, enmediate, in this discussion, aims to enumerate and uncover the specificity of computational mediation as mechanic processing. I therefore want to move quickly to thinking about what it means to enmediate the social. By the term ‘social’ I am particularly thinking in terms of the meditational foundations for sociality that were made available in 20th century media, and which when enmediated become something new. So sociality is not remediated, it is enmediated – that is, the computational mediation of society is not the same as the mediation processes of broadcast media, rather, it has a specificity that is occluded if we rely on the concept of remediation to understand it. Thus, it is not an originary form of social-

34

ity that is somehow encoded within media, and which is re-presented in the multiple remediations that have occurred historically. Rather, it is the enmediation of specific forms of sociality, which in the process of enmediation are themselves transformed, constructed, and made possible in a number of different modes of existence. So this work explores the relationship between sociality and enmediation, particularly in relation to code and software. It does so because sociality and enmediation are increasingly intertwined. That is, code and software become the conditions of possibility for human living, crucially becoming computational ecologies, which we inhabit with non-human actors.3 As such we need to take account of this new computational world and think about how we live today in a highly enmediated code-based condition. Computer code and software are not merely mechanisms, they represent an extremely rich form of media. They differ from previous instantiations of media forms in that they are highly processual. They can also have agency delegated to them, that they can then prescribe back onto other actors, but which also remain within the purview of humans to seek to understand. As Kitchin argues: The phenomenal growth in software creation and use is due to its emergent and executable properties: how it codifies the world into rules, routines, algorithms, and databases, and then uses these to do work in the world to render aspects of everyday life programmable. Whilst it is not fully sentient and conscious, software can exhibit some of the characteristics of “being alive” (Thrift and French, 2002). This property is significant because code enables technologies to do work in the world in an autonomous fashion – that is, it can process data, evaluate situations, and make decisions without human oversight or authorization.4 This deeply interactive characteristic of code and software, as computational media, makes it highly plastic for use in everyday life, and as such it has inevitably penetrated more and more into the lifeworld – social media is clearly an important example of this. This has created, and continues to create, specific tensions in relation to old media forms, as well as problems for managing and spectacularizing the relations of the public to the entertainment industry and politics. The notion of enmediation carries over the interests of the previous century’s critical theorists, particularly their concern with the liquidation of individuality and the homogenization of culture – the digital is a specific and paradigmatic form of this. Nonetheless, there is also considered to be a radical, if not revolutionary, kernel within computational media.5 This is due to the relative affordance code/software appears to give for individual autonomy within networks of association to share information and communicate. Nonetheless, here I want to understand enmediation as a broad concept related to the assemblage of both human and non-human actors. The aim is to explore changes

3. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 4. Rob Kitchin, ‘The Programmable City’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 38.6 (2011): 945. 5. See, David M. Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, London: Pluto Press, 2008; and Paola Antonelli, ‘States of Design 03: Thinkering’, Domus, 4 July 2011, http:// www.domusweb.it/en/design/states-of-design-03-thinkering-/.

theory of social media

35

that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds, or networks, what Mitcham calls a ‘new ecology of artifice’.6 The proliferation of contrivances that are computationally based is truly breathtaking, and each year we are given statistics that demonstrate how profound the new computational world is. For example, 427 million Europeans (or 65 percent) use the internet and more than 90% of European internet users read news online.7 These computational devices, of course, are not static, nor are they mute, and their interconnections, communications, operation, effects, and usage remain to be properly studied. This is made much more difficult by both the staggering rate of change, thanks to the underlying hardware technologies, which are becoming ever smaller, more compact, more powerful, and less power-hungry, and by the increase in complexity, power, range, and intelligence of the software that powers them. Of course, we should also be attentive to the over-sharing or excessive collection of data within these device ecologies that are outside of the control of the user to ‘redact themselves’, as represented by the recent revelation of Path and Hipster that were automatically harvesting user address book data.8 Computational devices and systems also enable the assemblage of new social ontologies and the corresponding social epistemologies that we have increasingly grown to take for granted in computational society, including Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter – we might say new social forms enmediated by the computational. The extent to which computational devices, and the computational principles on which they are based and from where they draw their power, have permeated the way we use and develop knowledges in everyday life is astounding, if we had not already discounted and backgrounded its importance. For example, David Zax9 has written about the extent to which computational methods like n-gramming are being utilized to decode everyday life.10 The ability to call up information instantly from a mobile device, combine it with other data streams, subject it to debate and critique through real-time social networks, and then edit, post, and distribute it worldwide would be incredible if it hadn’t already started to become so mundane to us. In fact, the much heralded ‘Age of Context’ is being built upon the conditions of possibility made feasible by distributed computing, cloud services, smart devices, sensors, and new programming practices around mobile technologies. This new paradigm in computing stresses the importance of connecting up multiple technologies that provide data from real-time streams and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to enable a new kind of intelligence within these technical devices. A good example of this is given

6. Carl Mitcham, ‘The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering’, Teorema, Vol. XVII/3 (Autumn, 1998): 43. 7. Robin Wauters, ‘427 Million Europeans are Now Online, 37% Uses More than One Device: IAB’, The Next Web, 31 May 2012, http://thenextweb.com/eu/2012/05/31/427-million-europeans-arenow-online-37-uses-more-than-one-device-iab/. 8. ‘iPhone Apps Path and Hipster Offer Address-book Apology’, BBC, 9 February 2012, http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16962129. 9. David Zax, ‘You Can’t Keep Your Secrets From Twitter’, Fast Company, 26 July 2011, http://www. fastcompany.com/1769217/there-are-no-secrets-from-twitter. 10. An n-gram is a list of ‘n’ items from a given sequence of textual materials or speech. The basic units can be letters, words, syllables, etc. Google n-gram viewer is a good example of using this technique to search textual corpora: http://books.google.com/ngrams.

36

by Google’s new ’Google Now’ product, which attempts to think ‘ahead’ of the user by providing algorithmic prediction based on past user behavior, preferences, Google search result history, smart device sensors, geolocation, and so forth. As they explain, Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time. It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team’s score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them.11 These new technologies form a constellation that creates new products and services, new tastes and desires, and the ability to make an intervention into forethought – what Google calls ‘Augmented Humanity’.12 In some senses this follows from the idea that after ‘human consciousness has been put under the microscope, [it has been] exposed mercilessly for the poor thing it is: a transitory and fleeting phenomenon’.13 The idea of augmented humanity and contextual computing are intended to remedy this ‘problem’ in human cognitive ability. Here the technologies are aware that they need to tread carefully as Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO, revealed ‘Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it’.14 The ‘creepy line’ is the point at which the public and politicians think a line has been crossed into surveillance, control, and manipulation, by capitalist corporations – of course, internally Google’s experimentation with these technologies is potentially much more radical and invasive. These new technologies need not be as dangerous as they might seem at first glance, and there is no doubt that the contextual computing paradigm can be extremely useful for users in their busy lives – acting more like a personal assistant than a secret policeman. Shel Israel argues that this new ‘Age of Context’ is made possible by the confluence of a number of competing technologies. He writes that contextual computing is built on, [1] social media, [2] really smart mobile devices, [3] sensors, [4] Big Data and [5] mapping. We argue that the confluence of these five forces creates a perfect storm whose sum is far greater than any one of the parts.15 Today it should, therefore, hardly come as a surprise that code/software lies as the key mediator between ourselves and the world we encounter, disconnecting the physical world from a direct coupling with our physicality, whilst managing a looser softwarized transmission system. Called ‘fly-by-wire’ in aircraft design, in reality, fly-by-wire is the condition of the computational environment we increasingly experience, and I

11. ‘Google Now’, Google, 2012, http://www.google.com/landing/now/. 12. See, Kit Eaton, ‘The Future According to Schmidt: “Augmented Humanity,” Integrated into Google’, Fast Company, 25 January 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1720703/futureaccording-schmidt-augmented-humanity-integrated-google. 13. Donald, quoted in Nigel Thrift, ‘Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification’, Economy and Society 35.2 (May, 2006): 284. 14. Shane Richmond, ‘Eric Schmidt: Google Gets Close to “the Creepy Line”’, The Telegraph, 5 October 2010, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005766/eric-schmidtgetting-close-to-the-creepy-line/. 15. Shel Israel, ‘Age of Context: Really Smart Mobile Devices’, Forbes, 5 September 2012, http:// www.forbes.com/sites/shelisrael/2012/09/05/age-of-context-really-smart-mobile-devices/.

theory of social media

37

elsewhere term computationality.16 This is a highly enmediated existence and has been a growing feature of the (post)modern world. Whilst many objects remain firmly material and within our grasp, it is easy to see how a more softwarized simulacra lies just beyond the horizon. Not that software isn’t material, of course, certainly it is embedded in physical objects and the physical environment, and requires a material carrier to function at all, such as the massive data centers that currently power our computational societies. Nonetheless, the materiality of software is without a doubt, differently material, more tenuously material, almost less materially material. This is partly due to software’s increasing tendency to hide its depths behind glass rectangular squares, which yield only to certain prescribed forms of interactions. Here I am thinking both of physical keyboards and trackpads, as much as haptic touch interfaces like those found in the iPad and other tablet computers, and new anticipatory interfaces, such as represented by Google Now and Apple Siri.

Web Bugs, Beacons, and Trackers Some examples will help to demonstrate how this code-based world is increasingly enmediating the world around us. Firstly, we might consider the growing phenomena of what are called ‘web bugs’ (also known as ‘web beacons’), that is, computer programming code that is embedded in seemingly benign surfaces but is actively and covertly collecting data and information about us.17 As Madrigal explains: This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you […] the list of companies that tracked my movements on the Internet in one recent 36-hour period of standard web surfing: Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet. Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science […] And that’s just the As. My complete list includes 105 companies, and there are dozens more than that in existence.18 Web bugs are automated data collection agents that are secretly included in the online pages that we browse. Often held within a tiny one pixel frame or image, which is therefore far too small for the naked eye to see, they execute code to secrete cookies onto your computer so that they can track user behavior, and also send various information about the user back to their servers.

16. David M. Berry, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave, 2011. 17. These include HTTP cookies, and Locally Stored Objects (LSOs) and document object model storage (DOM Storage). 18. Alexis C. Madrigal, ‘I’m Being Followed: How Google – and 104 Other Companies – Are Tracking Me on the Web’, The Atlantic, 29 February 2012, http://theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2012/02/im-being-followed-how-google-and-104-other-companies-are-tracking-me-onthe-web/253758/.

38

Originally designed as ‘HTTP state management mechanisms’ in the early 1990s, these data storage processes were designed to enable web pages and sites to store the current collection of data about a user, or what is called ‘State’ in computer science, known as ‘web bugs for web 1.0’.19 They were aimed at allowing website designers to implement some element of memory about a user, such as a current shopping basket, preferences, or username. It was a small step for companies to see the potential of monitoring user behavior by leaving tracking information about browsing, purchasing, and clicking behavior through the use of these early ‘cookies’.20 The ability of algorithms to track behavior, and collect data and information about users raises important privacy implications but also facilitates the rise of so-called behavior marketing and nudges.21 These technologies have become much more sophisticated in light of Web 2.0 technologies and developments in hardware and software; in effect, web bugs for web 2.0.22 Fortunately, we are seeing the creation of a number of useful software projects to allow us to track the trackers: Collusion, Foxtracks, and Ghostery, for example.23 If we look at the Ghostery log for the ChartBeat company24 it is described as: Provid[ing] real-time analytics to web sites and blogs. The interface tracks visitors, load times, and referring sites on a minute-by-minute basis. This allows real-time engagement with users giving publishers an opportunity to respond to social media events as they happen. ChartBeat also supports mobile technology through APIs.25 Web bugs perform these analytics by running code in the browser without the knowledge of the user, which if it should be observed, looks extremely complicated.26 Newer web bugs (Web 2.0) are much larger in size than their previous incarnation as tiny snippets of code or one pixel image files.27 They are also much less screenic, relying

19. Jaromir Dobias, ‘Privacy Effects of Web Bugs Amplified by Web 2.0’, in S. Fischer-Hübner et al. (eds) Privacy and Identity Management for Life, London: Springer, 2010, p. 245. 20. ‘Cookies are small pieces of text that servers can set and read from a client computer in order to register its “state.” They have strictly specified structures and can contain no more than 4 KB of data each. When a user navigates to a particular domain, the domain may call a script to set a cookie on the user’s machine. The browser will send this cookie in all subsequent communication between the client and the server until the cookie expires or is reset by the server’. (Sonal Mittal, ‘User Privacy and the Evolution of Third-party Tracking Mechanisms on the World Wide Web’, thesis, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, May 2010, http://www.stanford. edu/~sonalm/Mittal_Thesis.pdf, p. 10). 21. For a behaviourist approach see, Nir Eyal, ‘How To Manufacture Desire’, TechCrunch, 4 March 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/04/how-to-manufacture-desire/. 22. Dobias, ‘Privacy Effects of Web Bugs Amplified by Web 2.0’, p. 245. 23. Ghostery describes itself on its ‘about’ page: ‘Be a web detective. Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity’ (‘About Ghostery’, Ghostery, 2012, http://www.ghostery.com/about). Also see, https://disconnect.me/. 24. See, http://chartbeat.com. 25. ‘About ChartBeat’, Ghostery, 2012, http://www.ghostery.com/apps/chartbeat. 26. For an example see, http://static.chartbeat.com/js/chartbeat.js. 27. Also see examples at: Chartbeat, http://static.chartbeat.com/js/chartbeat.js; Google Analytics, http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js; Omniture, http://o.aolcdn.com/omniunih.js; Advertising. com, http://o.aolcdn.com/ads/adsWrapper.js.

theory of social media

39

not as greatly on requests for specific image files to count usage, than processual and agentic, often containing complex software functionality that runs within the browser (or app) on the user’s device. It is noticeable that this code is also extremely opaque and difficult to understand, even for experienced computer programmers. Indeed, one suspects an element of obfuscation, a programming technique to reduce the readability of the code and that is used to essentially shield the company from observation. In checking a number of web bugs on a variety of sites so far, I have been unable to find a web bug that supplies any commentary on what exactly the code is doing, beyond a short privacy policy statement. Again Ghostery can be useful in providing some general information on a particular bug (of the thousands that are now thought to be available).28 As Madrigal reports: In essence, [the Network Advertising Initiative] argued that users do not have the right to *not* be tracked. “We’ve long recognized that consumers should be provided a choice about whether data about their likely interests can be used to make their ads more relevant,” [they] wrote. “But the NAI code also recognizes that companies sometimes need to continue to collect data for operational reasons that are separate from ad targeting based on a user’s online behavior.” Companies “need to continue to collect data,” but that contrasts directly with users desire “not to be tracked”.29 These web bugs, beacons, pixels, and tags, as they are variously called, form part of the dark-net surveillance network that users rarely see, even though it is profoundly changing their experience of the internet in real-time by attempting to second guess, tempt, direct, and nudge behavior in particular directions.30 Ghostery ranked the web bugs in 2010 and identified these as the most frequently encountered (above average): Revenue Science (250x), OpenX (254x), AddThis (523.6x), Facebook Connect (529.8x), Omniture (605.7x), Comscore Beacon (659.5x), DoubleClick (924.4x), QuantCast (1042x), Google Adsense (1452x), Google Analytics (3904.5x).31 As can be seen in terms of relative size of encounter, Google is clearly the biggest player in the area of the collection of user statistics by a long distance. This data is important because, as JP Morgan’s Imran Khan explained, a unique visitor to each website at Amazon (e-commerce) is generating $189 per user, at Google (search) it is $24 per user, and although Facebook (social networking) is only generating $4 per user, this is a rapidly growing number.32 Keeping and holding these visitors, through real-time analytics, customer history, and behavioral targeting, etc. is increasingly extremely profitable. In28. ‘About Chartbeat’. 29. Alexis C. Madrigal, ‘I’m Being Followed: How Google – and 104 Other Companies – Are Tracking Me on the Web‘. 30. For example the page scraping of data from open access web pages using ‘robots’ or ‘spiders’ in order to create user repositories of data through aggregation and data analysis. Interestingly this is the way Google collects the majority of the index data it uses for its search results. This is also becoming a digital method in the social sciences and raises particular digital research ethics that have still to be resolved. See, https://www.issuecrawler.net/; http://socscibot.wlv.ac.uk/; and http://webatlas.fr/wp/navicrawler/. 31. Andy Kahl, ‘Ghostrank Planetary System’, Ghostery, 5 April 2011, http://purplebox.ghostery. com/?p=1016021670. 32. Jay Yarrow, ‘Chart of the Day: Here’s How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth’, Business Insider, 5 January 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-revenue-per-uniquevisitor-2011-1.

40

deed, Amazon has calculated that knowing and responding to customer needs is very important for profitability and ‘that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year’.33 Correspondingly, ‘Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day – meaning they’d serve up many millions fewer online adverts’, and hence make less money.34 Companies that are more explicitly collecting data and information often have data collection and privacy policies in place, for example Facebook35 or Google.36 An analysis by Cranor and McDonald found that it would take on average 201 hours per year to read privacy policies that users find in their everyday use of the internet, and which are extremely complicated legal documents.37 Unsurprisingly, few read them. Users are therefore often agreeing to certain data usage, collection, reselling, and aggregation without explicitly being aware of it. For example, whilst you are logged in Facebook collects, […] a timestamped list of the URLs you visit and pair it with your name, list of friends, Facebook preferences, email address, IP address, screen resolution, operating system, and browser. When you’re logged out, it captures everything except your name, list of friends, and Facebook preferences. Instead, it uses a unique alphanumeric identifier to track you.38 Of course, web bugs are a form of surveillance, and indeed it is no surprise that web bugs perform part of the tracking technologies used by companies to monitor staff. For example, in 2006 Hewlett Packard used web bugs from readnotify.com to trace insider leaks to the journalist Dawn Kawamoto and later confirmed in testimony to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that it’s ‘still company practice to use e-mail bugs in certain cases’.39 As can be seen, this is an extremely textured environment that currently offers little in terms of diagnosis or even warnings to the user. The industry, which prefers the term ‘clear GIF’ to web bug, certainly is keen to avoid regulation and keeps very much to itself in order to avoid raising too much unwarranted attention. Some of the current discussions over the direction of regulation on this issue have focused on the ‘do not track’ flag, which would signal a user’s opt-out preference within an HTTP header. Unfortunately very few companies respect the do not track header and there is currently no legal requirement that they do so in the U.S., or elsewhere.40 There have been some

33. Kit Eaton, ‘How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales’, Fast Company, 14 March 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/impatient-america-needs-faster-intertubes. 34. Eaton, ‘How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales’. 35. See, for example, Facebook’s ‘Data Use Policy’, http://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/. 36. See, for example, Google’s ‘Privacy Policy’, http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/. 37. Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor. ‘The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies’, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society (2008 Privacy Year in Review issue), http:// lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/readingPolicyCost-authorDraft.pdf. 38. Dylan Love, ‘Here’s the Information Facebook Gathers on You as You Browse the Web’, Business Insider, 18 November 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-tracking-2011-11. 39. Joris Evers, ‘How HP Bugged E-mail’, CNET, 28 September 2006, http://news.cnet.com/How-HPbugged-e-mail/2100-1029_3-6121048.html. 40. ‘Tracking Protection Working Group’, W3C, 2012, http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/.

theory of social media

41

moves towards self-regulation in the technology industry with a recent report from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.41 However, in the current debate over the EU ePrivacy Directive, the Article 29 Working Party (A29 WP) has stated that ‘voluntary plans drawn up by Europe’s digital advertising industry representatives, the European Advertising Standards Alliance (EASA) and IAB Europe, do not meet the consent and information requirements of the recently revised ePrivacy Directive’.42 As such, legislation may be introduced into the EU before elsewhere. With the greater use of computational networked devices, from mobile phones to GPS systems, these forms of tracking systems will only become more invasive and more aggressive in collecting data from our everyday life. Indeed, it is unsurprising to find that Americans, for example, are not comfortable with the growth in use of these tracker technologies. Pew found that, 73 percent of Americans said they would “not be okay” with being tracked (because it would be an invasion of privacy); only 23 percent said they’d be “okay” with tracking (because it would lead to better and more personalized search results) […] Despite all those high-percentage objections to the idea of being tracked, less than half of the people surveyed – 38 percent – said they knew of ways to control the data collected about them.43 This contradiction between the ability of these computational systems and surfaces to supply a commodity to the user, and the need to raise income through the harvesting of data which is in turn sold to advertisers and marketing companies, shows that this is an unstable situation. It also serves to demonstrate the extent to which users are just not aware of the subterranean depths of their computational devices and the ability for these general computing platforms to disconnect the user interface from the actual intentions or functioning of the device, whilst giving the impression to the user that they remain fully in control of the computer. Indeed, this disconnect between the enmediation of software, and previous attempts to think in terms of the concept of remediation, are important in highlighting how software is different from previous media. As Garber observes, underground network, surface illusion […] How much do we actually want to know about this stuff? Do we truly want to understand the intricacies of data-collection and personalization and all the behind-the-screen work that creates the easy, breezy experience of search [...] or would we, on some level, prefer that it remain as magic?44

41. Hayley Tsukayama, ‘FTC Releases Final Privacy Report, Says “Do Not Track” Mechanism May be Available by End of Year’, Washington Post, 26 March 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ business/technology/ftc-releases-final-privacy-report-says-do-not-track-mechanism-may-beavailable-by-end-of-year/2012/03/26/gIQAzi23bS_story.html. 42. Jennifer Baker, ‘European Watchdog Pushes for Do Not Track Protocol’, PCWorld, 6 March 6 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/251373/european_watchdog_pushes_for_ do_not_track_protocol.html. 43. Megan Garber, ‘Americans Love Google! Americans Hate Google!’, The Atlantic, 9 March 2012, http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/americans-love-google-americans-hategoogle/254253/. For more information on the Pew study on ‘Search Engine Use 2012’ see, http:// pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Summary-of-findings.aspx. 44. Garber, ‘Americans Love Google! Americans Hate Google!’

42

Indeed, as Aron reports, ‘up to 75 per cent of the energy used by free versions of Android apps is spent serving up ads or tracking and uploading user data’.45 That is, on free versions of popular apps most of the processing work in the app is spent monitoring user activities and sending it back home to servers.46 This ability for code/ software to monitor the user covertly and even obscure its processing activities will undoubtedly become a growing political and economic as well as technical issue.47

Lifestreams Lastly, I want to turn to connect these developments in web bugs to the use of selfmonitoring technologies called lifestreaming, or the notion of the quantified self.48 These have expanded in recent years as the ‘real-time stream’ platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, have grown. Indeed, some argue that ‘we’re finally in a position where people volunteer information about their specific activities, often their location, who they’re with, what they’re doing, how they feel about what they’re doing, what they’re talking about […] We’ve never had data like that before, at least not at that level of granularity’.49 This has been usefully described by the Economist, who argue that the idea of measuring things to chart progress towards a goal is commonplace in large organisations. Governments tot up trade figures, hospital waiting times and exam results; companies measure their turnover, profits and inventory. But the use of metrics by individuals is rather less widespread, with the notable exceptions of people who are trying to lose weight or improve their fitness [...] But some people are doing just these things. They are an eclectic mix of early adopters, fitness freaks, technology evangelists, personal-development junkies, hackers and patients suffering from a wide variety of health problems. What they share is a belief that gathering and analysing data about their everyday activities can help them improve their lives – an approach known as “self-tracking”, “body hacking” or “self-quantifying”.50 This phenomenon of using computational devices to monitor health signals and feed them back into calculative interfaces, data visualizations, and real-time streams, etc. is the next step in social media. This closes the loop of personal information online, which, although it remains notionally private, is stored and accessed by corporations who wish to use this biodata for data mining and innovation surfacing.

45. Jacob Aron, ‘Free Apps Eat up Your Phone Battery Just Sending Ads’, New Scientist, 18 March 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328566.400-free-apps-eat-up-your-phonebattery-just-sending-ads.html. 46. Abhinav Pathak, Y. Charlie Hu and Ming Zhang, ‘Where is the Energy Spent Inside My App? Fine Grained Energy Accounting on Smartphones with Eprof’, Eurosys 2012, 2012, http://research. microsoft.com/en-us/people/mzh/eurosys-2012.pdf. 47. See the following commercial examples of user control software for governing public exposure to trackers, web bugs, and compactants, although the question is, why you would choose to trust them?: https://cloudcapture.org/register/ and http://www.abine.com. 48. See, http://quantifiedself.com/. 49. Randy Rieland, ‘So What Do We Do With All This Data?’, Smithsonian, 23 January 2012, http:// blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2012/01/so-what-do-we-do-with-all-this-data/. 50. ‘Counting Every Moment’, The Economist, 3 March 2012, http://www.economist.com/ node/21548493.

theory of social media

43

Lifestreams were originally an idea from David Gelernter and Eric Freeman in the 1990s,51 which they described as: […] a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents – papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists. You manage your lifestream through a small number of powerful operators that allow you to transparently store information, organize information on demand, filter and monitor incoming information, create reminders and calendar items in an integrated fashion, and “compress” large numbers of documents into overviews or executive summaries.52 Gelernter originally described these as ‘chronicle streams’,53 highlighting their narrative and temporal dimensions related to the storage of documentation and texts. Today we are more likely to think of them as ‘real-time streams’ and the timeline functions offered by systems like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. These are increasingly the model of interface design that is driving the innovation in computation, especially in mobile and locative technologies. However, in contrast to the document-centric model that Gelernter and Freeman described, there are also the micro-streams of short updates, epitomized by Twitter, which has short text-message sized 140 character updates. Nonetheless this is still enough text space to incorporate a surprising amount of data, particularly when geo, image, weblinks, and so forth are factored in. Starting in 1989, Stephen Wolfram was certainly one of the first people to systematically collect their data. He explains, So email is one kind of data I’ve systematically archived. And there’s a huge amount that can be learned from that. Another kind of data that I’ve been collecting is keystrokes. For many years, I’ve captured every keystroke I’ve typed—now more than 100 million of them.54 This kind of self-collection is certainly becoming more prevalent, and in the context of reflexivity and self-knowledge, it raises interesting questions. The scale of data that is collected can also be relatively large and unstructured. Nonetheless, better data

51. Eric Thomas Freeman, ‘The Lifestreams Software Architecture’, PhD diss., Department of Computer Science, Yale University, May 1997, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/ dissertation/etf.pdf; and David Gelernter, ‘Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously’, The Edge, 3 March 2010, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter10/gelernter10_index.html. 52. Eric Thomas Freeman, ‘Welcome to the Yale Lifestreams Homepage!’, 2000, http://cs-www. cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html. 53. David Gelernter, ‘The Cyber-road Not Taken’. The Washington Post, April 1994. 54. Stephen Wolfram, ‘The Personal Analytics of My Life’, Stephan Wolfram blog, 8 March 2012, http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/.

44

management and techniques for searching and surfacing information from unstructured or semi-structured data will no doubt be revealing about our everyday patterns in the future.55 This way of collecting and sending data has been accelerated by the use of mobile apps, which are small relatively contained applications that usually perform a single specific function. For example, the Twitter app on the iPhone allows the user to send updates to their timeline, but also search other timelines, check out profiles, streams, and so on. When created as apps, however, they are also able to use the power of the local device, especially if it contains the kinds of sophisticated sensory circuitry that is common in smartphones, to log GPS geographic location, direction, etc. This is when lifestreaming becomes increasingly similar to the activity of web bugs in monitoring and collecting data on users that are active on the network. Indeed, activity streams have become a standard that is increasingly being incorporated into, and across, a number of media and software. An activity stream essentially encodes a user event or activity into a form that can be computationally transmitted and later aggregated, searched, and processed: In its simplest form, an activity consists of an actor, a verb, an object, and a target. It tells the story of a person performing an action on or with an object – “Geraldine posted a photo to her album” or “John shared a video”. In most cases these components will be explicit, but they may also be implied.56 This data and activity collection is only part of the picture, however. In order to become reflexive data it must be computationally processed from its raw state, which may be structured, unstructured, or a combination of the two. At this point it is common for the data to be visualized, usually through a graph or timeline, but there are also techniques such as heat-maps, graph theory, and so forth that enable the data to be processed and reprocessed to tease out patterns in the underlying data set. In both the individual and aggregative use case, in other words for the individual user (or lifestreamer) or organization (such as Facebook), the key is to pattern match and compare details of the data, such as against a norm, a historical data set, or against a population, group, or class of others. The patterned usage is therefore a dynamic real-time feedback mechanism in terms of providing steers for behavior, norms, and so forth, but also offering a documentary narcissism that appears to give the user an existential confirmation and status. Even in its so-called gamification forms, the awarding of competitive points, badges, honors, and positional goods, can more generally be seen as the construction of a hierarchical social structure within the group of users. It also encourages users to think of themselves as a set of partial objects, fragmented ‘dividuals’, or loosely connected proper-

55. Wolfram further writes: ‘It’s amazing how much it’s possible to figure out by analyzing the various kinds of data I’ve kept. And in fact, there are many additional kinds of data I haven’t even touched on in this post. I’ve also got years of curated medical test data (as well as my not-yet-very-useful complete genome), GPS location tracks, room-by-room motion sensor data, endless corporate records – and much much more […] And as I think about it all, I suppose my greatest regret is that I did not start collecting more data earlier’. (Wolfram, ‘The Personal Analytics of My Life’). 56. ActivityStreamsWG, ‘JSON Activity Streams 1.0’.

theory of social media

45

ties, collected as a time-series of data-points and subject to intervention and control. This can be thought of as a computational care of the self, facilitated by an army of oligopticons57 in the wider computational environment that observe and store behavioral and affective data. However, this self is reconciled through the code and software that makes the data make sense. The code and software are therefore responsible for creating and maintaining the significance and narratives through a stabilization and web of meaning for the actor.58 How might we draw these case studies together to think about living in code and software, and the implications for wider study in terms of research and the theorization of computational society?

Conclusions: Code, Compactants, and Contexts It seems that a thread runs through web bugs and lifestreaming: data collection, monitoring, and real-time feedback, whether overt or covert. Whilst we can continue to study these phenomena in isolation and think about them in terms of remediation, and indeed there can be very productive knowledge generated from this kind of research, it seems to me that we need to attend to the computationality represented in code and software to better understand such software enmediation.59 One of the most interesting aspects of these systems is that humans in many cases become the vectors that enable data transfers, thereby fuelling the computational economy. The concept of enmediation tried to take into account this assemblage quality of computational technology. Users are actively downloading apps that advertise the fact that they collect data and perhaps genuinely find an existential relief or recognition in their movements being watched, recorded, and available for later playback or analysis by ‘little brothers’. Web bugs, then, are in many ways lifestreams. Albeit lifestreams that have not been authorized by the user whom they are monitoring. This collection takes place by what we might call compactants, which are designed to passiveaggressively record data.60 With the notion of compactants (computational actants) I want to draw particular attention to the passive-aggressive feature of computational agents that are collecting information, both in terms of their passive quality – under the surface, relatively benign and silent – but also the fact that they are aggressive in their hoarding of data – monitoring behavioral signals, streams of affectivity, and so forth.61 The word compact also emits useful overtones of having all the necessary components or functions neatly fitted into a small package, and compact as in conciseness in expression. The etymology from the Latin compact for closely put together, or joined

57. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 58. See, http://open.sen.se/ for a particularly good example of this: ‘Make your data history meaningful. Privately store your flows of information and use rich visualizations and mashup tools to understand what’s going on’. (Sense, Feel. Act. Make sense, 2012, http://open.sen.se/). 59. Berry, The Philosophy of Software. 60. Computational actants, drawing the notion of actant from actor-network theory. 61. Of course compactants are not just ‘internal’ data collection agents. They may also be outside of your data resources and networks probing to get in. This kind of unauthorized access to personal data is on the rise and has been termed the industrialization of data theft. See, Scott M. Fulton,‘The Industrialization of Data Theft: Verizon’s Staggering New Data’, ReadWrite, 22 March 2012, http://readwrite.com/2012/03/22/the-industrialization-of-data.

46

together, also nearly expresses the sense of what web bugs and their related technologies are. The name compactants is also useful in terms of the notion of companion actants.62 Thus ‘compactant’ is an important middle-range concept in understanding how software enmediates. Interestingly, compactants are composed in such a way that they can be understood as having a dichotomous structure of data-collection/visualization, each of which is a specific mode of operation. Naturally, due to the huge quantities of data that is often generated, the computational processing and aggregation is often offloaded to the ‘cloud’, or server computers designed specifically for the task and accessed via networks. Indeed, many viruses, for example, often seek to ‘call home’ to report their status, upload data, or offer the chance of being updated, perhaps to a more aggressive version of themselves or to correct bugs. We might also think about the addressee of these wider computational systems made up of arrays or networks of compactants, which in many cases is a future actor. Within the quantified-self movement there is an explicit recognition that the ‘future self’ will be required to undo bad habits and behaviors of the present self. Or putting it another way, there is a dimension to computational devices that seems to require that software is not just mediation of the past and present, but enmediation of the probabilistic future. That is, there is an explicit normative context to a future self, who you, as the present self, may be treating unfairly, immorally, or without due regard to what has been described as ‘future self continuity’.63 This inbuilt tendency toward the futural is a fascinating reflection of the internal temporal representation of time within computational systems, which is enmediated as time-series structured streams of real-time data, often organized as lists. Therefore, the past (as stored data), present (as current data collection, or processed archival data), and future (as both the ethical addressee of the system and potential provider of data and usage), are often deeply embedded in the code that runs these systems. In some cases the future also has an objective existence as a probabilistic projection presented through contextual computing, literally a code-object, which is updated in real-time and which contains the major features of the future state represented as a model; computational weather prediction systems and climate change models are both examples of this. There are many examples of how attending to the code and software that enmediates many of the life, memory, and biopolitical systems and industries of contemporary society could yield similarly revealing insights into both our usage of code and software, and also the structuring assumptions, conditions, and affordances that are generated. Our use of computational models is growing, and our tendency is to confuse the screenic representation visualized by code/software with what we might call the real – not to mention our failure to appreciate the ways in which code’s enmediation is co-constructive of, and deeply involved in, the stabilization of everyday life today. Even so, within institutional contexts, code/software has not been fully incorporated

62. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. 63. Alina Tugend, ‘Bad Habits? My Future Self Will Deal With That’, New York Times, 24 February 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/business/another-theory-on-why-bad-habits-are-hardto-break-shortcuts.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all.

theory of social media

47

into the specific logics of these social systems, and in many ways undermines these structural and institutional forms.64 We must remain attentive to the fact that software engineering itself is a relatively recent discipline and its efforts at systematization and rationalization are piecemeal and incomplete, as the many hugely expensive software system failures attest. Of course, this code/software research is not easy, the techniques needed are still in their infancy, and whilst drawing on a wide range of scholarly work from the sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities, we are still developing our understanding. But this should give hope and direction to the critical theorists, both of the present looking to provide critique and counterfactuals, but also of the future, as code/software is a particularly rich site for intervention, contestation, and the unbuilding of code/software systems.65

References ‘About ChartBeat’, Ghostery, 2012, http://www.ghostery.com/apps/chartbeat. ‘About Ghostery’, Ghostery, 2012, http://www.ghostery.com/about. Activity Streams Working Group. ‘JSON Activity Streams 1.0’, Activity Streams, May 2011, http://activitystrea.ms/specs/json/1.0/. Antonelli, Paola. ‘States of Design 03: Thinkering’, Domus, 4 July 2011, http://www.domusweb.it/en/ design/states-of-design-03-thinkering-/. Aron, Jacob. ‘Free Apps Eat up Your Phone Battery Just Sending Ads’, New Scientist, 18 March 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328566.400-free-apps-eat-up-your-phone-battery-justsending-ads.html. Baker, Jennifer. ‘European Watchdog Pushes for Do Not Track Protocol’, PCWorld, 6 March 6 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/251373/european_watchdog_pushes_for_do_not_ track_protocol.html. Berry, David M. Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, London: Pluto Press, 2008. ______. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age, London: Palgrave, 2011. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ‘Counting Every Moment’, The Economist, 3 March 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21548493. Dobias, Jaromir. ‘Privacy Effects of Web Bugs Amplified by Web 2.0’, in S. Fischer-Hübner et al. (eds) Privacy and Identity Management for Life, London: Springer, 2010, pp. 244-257. Eaton, Kit. ‘The Future According to Schmidt: “Augmented Humanity,” Integrated into Google’, Fast Company, 25 January 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1720703/future-according-schmidtaugmented-humanity-integrated-google. ______. ‘How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales’, Fast Company, 14 March 2012, http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/impatient-america-needs-faster-intertubes. Evers, Joris. ‘How HP Bugged E-mail’, CNET, 28 September 2006, http://news.cnet.com/How-HPbugged-e-mail/2100-1029_3-6121048.html.

64. What we might call ‘outsider code’ or ‘critical code’ is an interesting development in relation to this. A number of websites offer code that data scrapes or screen scrapes information to re-present and analyze it for the user. Some examples include the Parltrack software, which is designed to improve the transparency of the EU parliamentary legislative process, http://parltrack. euwiki.org/; and TheyWorkForYou, which screen scrapes the UK Parliamentary minutes, http:// www.theyworkforyou.com/. 65. Here I tentatively raise the suggestion that a future critical theory of code and software is committed to unbuilding, disassembling, and deformation of existing code/software systems, together with a necessary intervention in terms of a positive moment in the formation and composition of future and alternative systems.

48

Eyal, Nir. ‘How To Manufacture Desire’, TechCrunch, 4 March 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/04/ how-to-manufacture-desire/. Freeman, Eric Thomas. ‘The Lifestreams Software Architecture’, PhD diss., Department of Computer Science, Yale University, May 1997, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/dissertation/etf.pdf. ______. ‘Welcome to the Yale Lifestreams Homepage!’, 2000, http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Fulton, Scott M. ‘The Industrialization of Data Theft: Verizon’s Staggering New Data’, ReadWrite, 22 March 2012, http://readwrite.com/2012/03/22/the-industrialization-of-data. Garber, Megan. ‘Americans Love Google! Americans Hate Google!’, The Atlantic, 9 March 2012, http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/americans-love-google-americans-hate-google/254253/. Gelernter, David. ‘The Cyber-road Not Taken’. The Washington Post, April 1994. ______. ‘Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously’, The Edge, 3 March 2010, http://www.edge. org/3rd_culture/gelernter10/gelernter10_index.html. ‘Google Now’, Google, 2012, http://www.google.com/landing/now/. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ‘iPhone Apps Path and Hipster Offer Address-book Apology’, BBC, 9 February 2012, http://www.bbc. co.uk/news/technology-16962129. Israel, Shel. ‘Age of Context: Really Smart Mobile Devices’, Forbes, 5 September 2012, http://www. forbes.com/sites/shelisrael/2012/09/05/age-of-context-really-smart-mobile-devices/. Kahl, Andy. ‘Ghostrank Planetary System’, Ghostery, 5 April 2011, http://purplebox.ghostery. com/?p=1016021670. Kitchin, Rob. ‘The Programmable City’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 38.6 (2011): 945-951. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Love, Dylan. ‘Here’s the Information Facebook Gathers on You as You Browse the Web’, Business Insider, 18 November 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-tracking-2011-11. Madrigal, Alexis C. ‘I’m Being Followed: How Google – and 104 Other Companies – Are Tracking Me on the Web’, The Atlantic, 29 February 2012, http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/imbeing-followed-how-google-and-104-other-companies-are-tracking-me-on-the-web/253758/. McDonald, Aleecia M. and Lorrie Faith Cranor. ‘The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies’, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society (2008 Privacy Year in Review issue), http://lorrie.cranor. org/pubs/readingPolicyCost-authorDraft.pdf. McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Mitcham, Carl. ‘The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering’, Teorema, Vol. XVII/3 (Autumn, 1998): 27-47. Mittal, Sonal. ‘User Privacy and the Evolution of Third-party Tracking Mechanisms on the World Wide Web’, thesis, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, May 2010, http://www.stanford. edu/~sonalm/Mittal_Thesis.pdf. Pathak, Abhinav, Y. Charlie Hu and Ming Zhang. ‘Where is the Energy Spent Inside My App? Fine Grained Energy Accounting on Smartphones with Eprof’, Eurosys 2012, 2012, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mzh/eurosys-2012.pdf. Richmond, Shane. ‘Eric Schmidt: Google Gets Close to “the Creepy Line”, The Telegraph, 5 October 2010, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005766/eric-schmidt-gettingclose-to-the-creepy-line/. Rieland, Randy. ‘So What Do We Do With All This Data?’, Smithsonian, 23 January 2012, http://blogs. smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2012/01/so-what-do-we-do-with-all-this-data/. Sense, Feel. Act. Make sense, 2012, http://open.sen.se/. Thrift, Nigel. ‘Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification’, Economy and Society 35.2 (May, 2006): 279-306.

social media monopolies and their alternatives

49

‘Tracking Protection Working Group’, W3C, 2012, http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/. Tsukayama, Hayley. ‘FTC Releases Final Privacy Report, Says “Do Not Track” Mechanism May be Available by End of Year’, Washington Post, 26 March 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/ftc-releases-final-privacy-report-says-do-not-track-mechanism-may-be-availableby-end-of-year/2012/03/26/gIQAzi23bS_story.html. Tugend, Alina. ‘Bad Habits? My Future Self Will Deal With That’, New York Times, 24 February 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/business/another-theory-on-why-bad-habits-are-hard-tobreak-shortcuts.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all. Wauters, Robin. ‘427 Million Europeans are Now Online, 37% Uses More than One Device: IAB’, The Next Web, 31 May 2012, http://thenextweb.com/eu/2012/05/31/427-million-europeans-are-nowonline-37-uses-more-than-one-device-iab/. Wolfram, Stephen. ‘The Personal Analytics of My Life’, Stephan Wolfram blog, 8 March 2012, http:// blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/. Yarrow, Jay. ‘Chart of the Day: Here’s How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth’, Business Insider, 5 January 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-revenue-per-unique-visitor-2011-1. Zax, David. ‘You Can’t Keep Your Secrets From Twitter’, Fast Company, 26 July 2011, http://www. fastcompany.com/1769217/there-are-no-secrets-from-twitter.

50

Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life

/

Ganaele Langlois

social media psychic life profit communication more platforms users information other world lives political meaningful being

theory of social media

51

On what basis should we develop alternatives to Facebook and other for-profit social networking sites? A great deal of discussion and a large number of projects presented at the Unlike Us Amsterdam conference in 2012 focused on alternatives to Facebook that disentangle the social from the for-profit motive. Overall, alternatives to Facebook have been focused on the politics and rights of users, with special attention to rebuilding privacy on social networks, from the right to anonymity to re-empowering users to be able to decide what kind of data can be collected on them and for what purposes. While crucial, the question of privacy is not the only one that needs to be addressed. The uniqueness of social media can be examined not so much as content delivery platforms, but rather as platforms through which we live our lives. Social media, contrary to the media of old, are not in the business of developing content: social media users are the main content creators, be they professional app developers or high school students. What social media do, which is unique to them and radically different from other media, is that they offer us a set of tools and practices to make content meaningful to us, to our likes, to our life. Social media, then, are in the business of making us live our lives by helping us find, foster and maintain meaningful connections to information, people, movements, and in all, the world at large. This is perhaps why we have grown so attached to them in their short period of existence. This conception of social networks as platforms for living begs for further exploration. Living in this specific context has to do with the constant search for meaning: meaningful connections, meaningful information, meaningful action. The kind of living I am referring to here is mundane, but also philosophical, and as I would particularly like to argue here, psychological. What happens, though, when our psychic lives have to be mediated by information technologies that primarily serve a for-profit motive? That psychic life has become a new market to be invested in is bound to raise some concerns. At the same time, one should not deny the potential for developing new spaces that make use of information and network technologies in ways that are more at the service of human users: technologies for fostering creativity and, in psychoanalytic terms, authenticity.

Platforms for Living ‘Why won’t more people give up on Facebook now that we know how bad it is for privacy?’ Such a question, which was raised in one of the discussion periods of the Unlike Us Amsterdam conference, is somewhat tricky to tackle for any critic of social media focused on thinking about alternatives. Indeed, the dangers of the likes of Face-

52

book for privacy are routinely making the headlines and yet, Facebook is getting more users. Answers to this conundrum usually include the stickiness of for-profit social media as now essential components of human communication; the loss of connection that would happen if one was to give up the main platforms through which to be in touch with friends and family; the uncanny and widespread addiction to constantly changing flows of updates; and the pervasive attitude that privacy does not matter as most people do not feel like they have something to hide.1 Or to put it simply, for-profit social media are just too much a part of our lives for us to do without, and too complicated and expensive for us to construct alternatives. All these answers suggest that social media hold a new kind of power, that they are more than just tools, or means of communication. Giving up social media is not on the same level as, say, giving up watching TV or playing computer games. What is at stake is more than entertainment or information gathering: social media allow us to carry on living and provide a platform for experiencing friendship, love, utter boredom, and loneliness in no particular order, in short, the very stuff of life. Without them as a constant presence on our computers, tablets, or cell phones, we would be missing out, quite literally, on our lives. It is this point – that social media are platforms through which we live our lives – that I would like to explore here. Social media are both incredibly dangerous and incredibly liberating because their main investment is in lives being lived. What we need now is a new framework to understand the relations between social media and life, and in particular, the ways in which social media operate within the realms of not only social or cultural life, but also psychic life: not only our practices and knowledge, but also our emotions, affects, desires and fears, both extraordinary and mundane. Social media, and this is what I focus on here, operate at the moment of the opening up of the psyche to the world: the moments when we seek an outside confirmation of what it is we are experiencing inside, the moments when we seek out external contact in order to feed our psychic needs for comfort, support, excitement, and reassurance. Such a perspective on the psychic process of opening up to the world has mostly been developed within psychoanalysis, and under the label of a ‘relational’ approach.2 The relational approach includes a wide array of theoretical perspectives that start with the premise that relationships to other human beings are at the core of the development of the psyche.3 These theories, in short, argue that subjectivity and personal identity formation cannot exist without intersubjectivity, without an other subject to recognize us as individual subject, and relate to us as such.4 From a psychoanalytic treatment perspective, becoming a robust individual capable of feeling a wide range of emotions, of being creative and resourceful, requires having been in relation with benevolent figures.

1. Daniel Solove, ‘“I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy’, Social Science Research Network, 12 July 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=998565. 2. Stephen Frosh, Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic, London: Palgrave Macmilan, 2010, p. 32. 3. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2005. 4. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, 1st edition, London: Routledge, 1997; Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

theory of social media

53

How do social media invest in psychic life? Social media are structuring platforms linking language, technology, economics, and psychology in very unique ways: language now is both a reflection of the psyche as well as it is a set of informational technologies. Thoughts, affects, and emotions do not simply emanate from the human psyche anymore, they are valuable products that can now be produced by search engine and recommendation software in an environment that makes a profit out of people expressing themselves and living their lives. As such, most of the popular social media, with the exception of Wikipedia, have been invaded by the for-profit motive, and the informational capacity of social media makes it possible to open up psychic life – the life of intangible thoughts, affects and emotions - to marketization. It is time, therefore, to develop a political economy of psychic life: we need to study the structuration of power formations serving specific interests (i.e. commercial profit-making) through the building of alliances of diverse political, economic, cultural, technological, linguistic, and psychic processes. A political economy of social media specifically interrogates how these dynamics of structuration are organized and patterned through the interfaces, data repository, and information processing systems developed within and across social media platforms. Such an analytical project will make it possible to identify alternatives to social media with regards to psychic involvement.

Free Communication and Liberated Lives? Social media, and in particular the most popular platforms such as the parts of the Google universe (Blogger, YouTube, Google +), along with social networking sites (Facebook), and micro-blogging platforms (Twitter), have radically deconstructed the links between free communication as the unfettered exchange of information and positive social change, and collective and individual empowerment and transformation. Social media seemingly reconcile the promise of democratic, free, and uncensored communication with for-profit ventures. Now, as the mainstream story goes, democratic revolutions such as the 2011 Arab Spring are rendered possible by giant social media platforms, in particular Facebook and Twitter. It thus seems that meaningful connections, creative potential, and transformative actions (in short, the stuff that makes life worth living), go hand-in-hand with the for-profit motive. As the story goes, it does not matter what kind of social media is being developed: whether for-profit or not-for-profit, social media mean undeniable progress towards more egalitarian and socially relevant forms of communication. The problem with such an equation between unfettered communication and positive transformation is that it only looks at one aspect of social media: the communication among human users at the interface level. Social media are much more than that: software and informational machines communicate with users as well, particularly through search suggestions, targeted recommendations, and automated updates. Furthermore, communication on social media is not simply at the interface level, it also takes place at the back-end through the trafficking of user data in order to generate large amounts of profiling information that can then be sold to third parties. As such, we now need to consider that free communication among users should not be entirely equated with positive transformation and liberation: after all, the content I

54

put on for-profit social media ceases to belong to me, and is captured and monitored for purposes other than what I intended. I might be free to communicate, but what I express can be privatized, put under surveillance and monitored without my consent. One could argue anyway that the communication among users is still important and can evolve and circulate in the human sphere and have deep social, political, and psychic repercussions regardless of what data capture system is being used. However, social media play a crucial role in trying to establish the meaningfulness of information. Social media do not simply display information, they rank it from the more meaningful to the less meaningful. Social media have different logics of ranking, but increasingly they have to do with personalization, that is, closeness in a network of connections: what is meaningful is what is near me, speaks my language, is liked by my network, and fits with my views and those of my peers. In so doing, the politics of human communication are not simply about what is being said, or put out there: they have to do increasingly with the informational logics of social media, and how social media distribute, hierarchize, and attribute meaningfulness to information. Given this new context, we should be weary of the once unquestionable link between free communication and transformation for the better, although for-profit social media are based on this assumption: the ideology of social media is that the more the platform knows about a user, the more it can serve his or her needs, suggest discovery paths, and find answers. As such, social media are not just venues for sharing information and communication – they offer patterns and guidance about how to go about our daily lives and our being with others. Social media are mundane, ubiquitous and psychic. Their purpose is to tell us what we should do, what we want, how we should feel, who should be our next friend, what is our next favorite TV show, novel or movie, and which political cause is worthy of our attention, etc. One of the paradoxes of social media, however, is that in their constant search for meaningfulness, they end up making communication meaningless. This perhaps is more of a Western ‘so what?’ phenomenon: so many activists and citizens have a presence on social media, yet it does not often lead to any kind of meaningful change. Meaningful is the keyword here: in the deconstruction of the politics of communication that happens through social media, simply saying something is not enough. In order for any kind of human communication to be meaningful, it has to be noticed by others, and then lead to some kind of political action, or social change, or shift in awareness. The problem is that communication on social media does not always lead to transformative practices and meaningful actions. More often than not, raising awareness about an issue just stagnates at the level of never-ending discussion. While I do not want to suggest that communication tactics could not be put in place to address this phenomenon, there is a built-in paradoxical logic of social media platforms: in order to retain the attention of users, the search for meaningfulness has to be never-ending, and any kind of gratification needs to be temporary or constantly delayed. As such, the constant circulation of information in networks that are cut off from real transformative possibilities gives rise to meaninglessness.

theory of social media

55

Furthermore, the articulation of data gathering and specific search logics for personalization purposes is not the same as mirroring the unknown desires and psychic needs of users, although for-profit social media do a very good job at convincing us of this. In particular, social media suffer from an excess of positive connectivity: the assumption is that a happy individual is one who is constantly connecting with others online. The right to be left alone, to look at a distance, to be weary, in short, to have multiple kinds of connection with others, including negative connections, tends to not exist on for-profit social media. In all, social media have inserted themselves as the media who can help in the unfolding of our lives, although their success in doing so is sometimes negated by their forprofit motive. Rather than in the therapeutic situation, where we are mainly encouraged to rely on ourselves with the support of a benevolent other for change, social media allow us to expel our uncertainties and desires, to literally find the answer elsewhere. Our critical interest, then, should be placed on those moments when social media seek to meet and match-up with the human psyche through personalized recommendations, suggestions, and admonitions.

From Machinic Subjectivation to Psychic Investment Social media platforms teeter on a fine line, between enriching our lives and, in their ever-growing knowledge about us, overly controlling them. It is not possible to deny one of these two aspects of social media, as they are intrinsically linked: the economic success of for-profit social media is based on users’ continuous search for and struggle with meaningfulness, connection, and self-discovery. Social media make use of communication, of information networks, of data-mining to produce ways in which we can engage in this search. What is needed is a framework to understand what life on social media has become, and in particular the new contours of such a problematic articulation of capitalist motives and psychic life through software platforms and data networking. For these reasons, I would like to further explore the trafficking of data at the back-end of social media but in so doing to turn away from questions of software and network architecture towards the question of life: how do social media insert themselves within the process of self-discovery through opening up to the world? Such an exploration is already well under way thanks to autonomist works that have identified the rise of new forms of capitalism that financially and technologically invest in creativity, intelligence, knowledge, and language for economic success. The trafficking of user data is about the management of subjectivation.5 Looking at subjectivation means looking at the processes through which we become specific subjects. Subjectivation takes place when we are educated, invited, forced, coerced, or convinced to try to fit within specific power formations. In the for-profit social media environment this actualization can take the form of product purchases that are recommended to us on our Gmail or Facebook account, or having to watch advertisements

5. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan, New York: Semiotext(e), 2012; Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, New York: Semiotext(e), 2009; Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, 1st US edition, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

56

on YouTube before being able to watch the video of our choice. In these cases, we are strongly invited to fit in with the customer subject position, and to realize that one of our central modes of proving our existence is through the buying of commodities. However, such a classical form of consumer subjectivation is but one aspect of what is taking place on for-profit social media. Subjectivation also means fitting within the logic of social media platforms through continuous status updates, accepting recommendations, clicking on links, etc., overall, through continuous use of the platform. Such good behaviors can be rewarded: if I invite other people to use a social media platform, then I can get bigger storage for my account or credit for purchases, and other perks. Subjectivation takes place when we are invited and encouraged to adopt specific modes of usership – ways of expressing ourselves, ways of valuing the informational logic of the platform and its recommendation system, and ways of relating to others. One of the biggest perks of being a ‘good’ user is to be recognized and seen by the rest of the network: the more I contribute on Facebook and interact with peers and accept lack of control over my own data, the more prominently my contributions will be featured, therefore, the more popular I will become; the more I review products on other social media platforms, the more I will be presented as a trustworthy contributor. This reward system allows for a sense of empowerment of the user, of greater possibilities, and is in keeping with Foucault’s definition of power as productive rather than entirely repressive.6 The subject, in this case, the social media user, has to conform to some rules and ways of doing things in order to have the possibility to enrich his or her self. The influence of autonomist thought is key to understanding the new form of capitalism that is developed through social media: one that feeds directly off the subjective life of users in order to create the ideal conditions of consumption.7 Social media are not about the selling of commodities, they are about creating the attitudes and subject positions that can be mined for commercialization purposes. While subjectivation is an important site of analysis, we should keep in mind that the concept of the subject is not the same as psychic life. Subjectivation can operate on multiple levels: psychic, but also biological, political, and economic among others. Psychic life, in turn, cannot be reduced to being one aspect of the process of subjectivation: it also includes the multiple reactions, both conscious and unconscious, that take place as we encounter the world and derive from it models of behavior, expectations, and beliefs.8 Looking at the psychic reactions to processes of subjectivation invites us to analyze a whole realm of human experience that has been so far mostly discussed within the field of psychoanalysis. In relational theories, one way to analyze the relationships between subjectivation and psychic life is through the concept of the false self.9 A false

6. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, New York: Vintage, 1980. 7. Maurizio Lazzarato, Révolutions Du Capitalisme, Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2004. 8. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 1st edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 86. 9. D.W. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’, in D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, New York: International UP Inc., 1965, pp. 140-152.

theory of social media

57

self is created to fit into external pressures that one cannot control and the true self – the self capable of creativity, of forging meanings, of transforming itself – is buried. What that entails, though, is a pervasive feeling of living an empty and depleted life marked by mental health issues such as depression, anguish, stress and paranoia. What I would like to argue next, then, is that depression, dissociation, desires, feelings of satisfaction, as well as the search for attachment figures, the navigating of relationships to the Other, now have to be included in any critical approach to social media, including a political economy one. Such a bridge between questions regarding the psyche and critical studies is well under way: theories of subjectivity have been combined with psychoanalytic theory,10 while psychic life, starting with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus,11 along with Guattari’s work on schizo-analysis,12 has been taken out of the confines of the psychoanalytical setting to become a matter of politics and technology. In all, the turn towards immaterial forms of labor has raised greater awareness of the state of the psyche as a reflection of contemporary power struggles. Bifo’s exploration of the ‘soul at work’13 and his examination of depression, stress and paranoia as a product of a capitalist system that feeds off the human psyche by investing in the human capacity for creation and imagination illustrate this new turn in the mining of psychic life through information technologies. In the case of social media, dissatisfaction with one’s location as a site of subjectivation gives way to a range of phenomena that current critical and political economy analyses tend to ignore: lassitude, paranoia, non-engagement, apathy, depletion in the face of the constant personalized streams of information we receive should be taken into account. Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together,14 while often summarized as yet another pessimistic account of social media, raises an important point: through social media use, we expose our vulnerabilities – our need for connection, for recognition, for meaningfulness – to a technological apparatus that has instilled itself as that which can make sense of the world for us. The problem is that connection to the world in order to discover one’s place in the world is not the same as network connectivity: the constant linking that happens through social media gives very little space to pauses, constructive breakdowns, and the creation of new ways of seeking reassurance from the world.

Transitional Media Given this new context of what could be called a form of psychic capitalism, what could alternatives to for-profit social media look like? It should be clear at this point that the design of user interfaces is only part of the answer. The Amsterdam Unlike Us conference was extremely useful in pointing out that the communication that happens at the interface level among users is only the tip of the iceberg, if we want to understand the new kind of power that social media yield. 10. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1st edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 12. Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e), 2010. 13. Berardi, The Soul at Work. 14. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books, 2011.

58

At the interface level, we can have an impression of free communication and free expression, where expressions can be shared by anybody. However, it is crucial to study the back-end of social media platforms, and the trafficking and mining of user data, profiles, likes, behaviors, and preferences that can be associated with commodities. Worries about privacy, intellectual property, black-boxed platforms, and networks thus highlight the fact that the site of power struggles has shifted from communication among human actors to the circulation of one’s data within invisible networks that come back to haunt us as a constant stream of personalized recommendations. Indeed, the capacity to track individual users online, but also, through the spread of geo-location tools, in the real world, raises serious concerns about the overbearing presence of insidious marketing in our lives. My point about social media and psychic life should be seen as an extension of this concern with privacy: through constant tracking and profiling, social media attempt to pinpoint potential moments of when one’s psyche opens up to the world. The new markets for personalized commodification and marketing that this offers are barely being defined, but one could easily see the risk posed by the expansion of subjection strategies further and further into the psyche. While I do not want to negate the crucial importance of the negative aspects of social media, I would like to turn now to examining their more potentially transformative aspects. This really is about how social media platforms have inserted themselves as central components of psychic and subjective life as we use social media more and more as platforms for self-discovery, for forging relationships (whether intimate or more superficial, whether for friendship or professional networking), for, in short, being with each other and with ourselves. In many ways, this work is already under way: the design of alternative social networks obviously includes a reflection on the condition of being a user, and on the ideal relation among users and between users and technology.15 Reflecting on social networking technology as an aid to psychic living aims to give new conceptual tools for furthering such reflections. Any kind of transformative project, including political ones, requires opening up a sense of possibilities. Social media do open up this sense of possibilities, but their focus on the for-profit motives curtails and oftentimes eventually negates the very sense of creative possibility through authentic encounters with others. This sense of possibility cannot simply be material – it has to enter into psychic life. Thus from economics and information politics we switch to psychotherapy and sociotherapy to examine how social media can enrich lives. This pharmacological perspective, from Stiegler’s concept of pharmacology as that which is both poison and cure depending on dosage and mixing with other ingredients,16 requires thinking about social media beyond the notion of connectivity to that of authentic recognition. That is, we need to develop social media as spaces where we are not only put in touch with others, but also where we can fully explore what relationships with others can mean, and how they can help generate a sense of creativity and transformation.

15. Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham and London: Duke University Press Books, 2008. 16. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, Malden and Cambridge: Polity, 2010.

theory of social media

59

The problem is that the cultivation of psychic transformation at the service of reviving one’s creativity and life-force is mostly addressed through the very specific setting of the psychoanalytical clinic: a therapist and a client or clients devoting a specific amount of time to work on resolving conflicts and issues that prevent the formation of an authentic self capable of defining and finding meaningfulness. Such a setting, of course, would be difficult to transpose to a social media platform. In particular, the contemporary psychoanalytic setting is dependent on the absence of mediation: the main mode of transformation is through a direct verbal exchange between client and therapist. Social media should not be re-included in psychic life as some kind of artificial intelligence that could take on the traditional therapeutic role of objective interpreter of psychological symptoms. Rather, as much as current psychoanalytic treatment is based on reflecting on and exploring the relational space between therapist and clients, so social media can act as a space of mediation to explore the contours of creativity in one’s specific setting. As such, there is much promise in conceptualizing social media as transitional spaces. The idea of the transitional comes from Winnicott’s analysis of children’s relationships with special toys or objects (i.e. a special teddy bear, or a special blanket). Winnicott argues that these objects serve a fundamental transitional function in that they offer a place that is neither entirely internal to the child’s psyche nor completely belonging to an external reality.17 The transitional object offers a secure space in-between the external and internal where a subject can experiment with the world out there. Transitional objects can be extended to art as artistic experiences transmit and awaken in the spectator a sense of creativity, of new potential. The question, then, is to know how social media could be designed as transitional spaces. This requires thinking about how information and data processing could be used to allow users to create, rehearse and play with representations of themselves and representations of others. At the same time, it is crucial to develop a kind of social media that does not provide only a gaming simulation. This would foster a solipsistic environment where everything becomes unreal, simulated, and cut off from life out there. Thus, thinking about social media as transitional spaces requires that we understand them as providing what Judith Butler18 calls norms of recognition: the spaces and patterns through which we examine, figure out, and forge who we are in relation to others. In that sense, social media as transitional media should include a space of reflection on authentic encounter and should be able to raise awareness about the conditions of being subjects in the world with others. Such recommendations, at this point, might seem too broad and vague, but they might be helpful for developing new perspectives about technically-mediated connections to others and the world.

Psychic Life and the Importance of Recognition Needless to say, talking about psychic life is fraught with perils, the first one being the very real risk of sounding extremely corny by bringing in to the fore affects and emotions (such as love, loneliness and yearning) that are usually not considered as part of any ‘serious’ political and critical projects. However, it would be a mistake to only see social media from the perspective of information politics in the narrow sense: social

17. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. 18. Judith Butler, Frames Of War, London and New York: Verso Press USA, 2010.

60

media are not just tools for control, they are the platforms through which we live our lives, through which, increasingly and perhaps sometimes exclusively, we express our search for meaning and connection. Not taking into account the many consequences of this search – from privacy issues and surveillance to the commodification of psychic life – would be detrimental to crafting viable alternatives to social media. Social media impose specific patterns of connectivity to psychic life: social media are not about providing content (that is the job of other users or third parties), they are about providing the patterns through which the exchange of content can become an act of meaningful recognition of one’s place in the world (with friends, with institutions, with cultural texts, etc.) and can therefore lead to action (such as the purchase of a commodity, or engagement in political acts). Of course such patterning is not smooth, and the emotional and existential dissatisfactions we experience with for-profit social media are important indicators of the interpenetration of economic motives and psychic development. Deconstructing such interpenetration, in turn, can lead to a new conception of the role of social media in psychic life.

References Benjamin, Jessica. Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, 1st edition, London: Routledge, 1997. ______. Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, New York: Semiotext(e), 2009. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 1st edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ______. Frames Of War, London and New York: Verso Press USA, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1st edition, Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1983. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, New York: Vintage, 1980. Frosh, Stephen. Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic, London: Palgrave Macmilan, 2010. Guattari, Félix. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans.Taylor Adkins, New York: Semiotext(e), 2010. Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham and London: Duke University Press Books, 2008. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Révolutions Du Capitalisme, Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2004. ______. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan, New York: Semiotext(e), 2012. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy, Malden and Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books, 2011. Solove, Daniel. ‘“I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy’, Social Science Research Network, 12 July 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=998565. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson. 1st US edition, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2005. ______. ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’, in D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, New York: International UP Inc., 1965, pp. 140-152.

theory of social media

61

The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity

/

Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey

privacy publicity social more media information new stage public when most other front back fan dance

62

The history of our digitally-connected present is already being written: writers, within and outside of the academy, have constructed a modern mythology about how social media and other digital technologies are eroding our once-valued privacy and creating a new cultural movement of mass publicity in its stead. We believe, however, that this narrative of digital mass exhibitionism is a fiction that rests on an incorrect assumption that privacy and publicity are zero-sum. While the common, simple, story is that publicity comes at the expense of privacy, we provide a counter-narrative that demonstrates a dialectical relationship, where privacy and publicity are deeply intertwined, mutually reinforcing, and perhaps both increasing as digital information grows more ubiquitous. And, we believe that this interplay between the revelation and concealment is, at least partially, responsible for the seductive quality of social media. We do not challenge the notion that our lives are becoming more public.1 In her research on young people using social media, danah boyd observed this trend saying, ‘the experiences that teens are facing in the publics that they encounter appear more similar to the celebrity idea of public life than to the ones their parents face’.2 Empirical data supports the claim that information sharing via social media is widespread. In 2012, 48% of American adults used social networking sites daily (up from 27% just three years earlier).3 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg predicts that social media will not only continue to gain users but that these users will grow more active so that ‘next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before’.4 In this sense, individuals may have more opportunities to be visible than ever before. The increasing publicity found in the lives of social media has led innumerable commentators to bemoan a perceived loss of the possibility of having privacy again – often

1. See also, Nathan Jurgenson, ‘Rethinking Privacy and Publicity on Social Media: Part I’, The Cyborgology Blog, 30 June 2011, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/06/30/rethinkingprivacy-and-publicity-on-social-media-part-i/. 2. danah boyd, ‘Why Youth